“What’s great about our Isis furniture is its adaptability, which is a powerful support to enable our teachers to deliver a 21st century curriculum. It facilitates far greater collaboration and flexibility in how we work. The furniture works equally well in a traditional classroom, it doesn’t need to be in an open plan space to deliver the flexibility and choice our staff and pupils needed."
Howard Martin, Headteacher, Yew Tree Primary School
The vision:
o Responsive, flexible spaces to help deliver a more collaborative style of teaching and learning and their changing curriculum.
o Furniture that would create opportunities for different staff to collaborate and develop a range of different pupil groupings, both in terms of pupil numbers and their age.
The furniture
t41 individual student tables
Newton chairs
Beanbags
The result
“If you are given different tools you work in a different way. Our teachers can now organise and tailor their classrooms how they want and to suit different styles of delivery. Staff are increasingly delivering lessons in the hall because the furniture is so portable. The huge bean bags provide another choice – the pupils and staff love to use them for individual, paired and small group activities using laptops, ipads or simply just to sit and read for pleasure on. The whole range of furniture means we can experiment with different ways of teaching.”
Click on the image to the left to read some of the children’s feedback.
Mr Martin explains why they reacted so positively:
“The furniture gives them a degree of autonomy over how and where they learn, and with whom. Because they can move the furniture around themselves, they have greater control over their environment, which encourages independence and gives choice.”