Schools put heads together for Brain Awareness Week

Students from a city-based sixth form college and a rural village college are to benefit from a partnership between their respective schools.

The collaboration between the Cambridge Centre for Sixth Form Studies (CCSS) and Bassingbourn Village College will see the two schools pool resources to develop student opportunities and good teaching practice.

Principals, trustees and governors from both establishments have been meeting together to see how they might work together and have come up with a joint venture that will develop over coming months. Duncan Cooper, Principal of Bassingbourn Village College, said: “We were delighted to invite staff and students from CCSS to meet some of our senior students this week. There are so many ways that our schools can support each other, both with educational developments and student opportunities. This is a very exciting longterm partnership that will benefit us all.”

Stuart Nicholson, CCSS Principal, added: ”All of us at CCSS hope that this will be the first of many shared endeavours with our friends at Bassingbourn Village College.”

The venture was launched with an event to mark Brain Awareness Week with over 100 students from both establishments gathering in Bassingbourn to hear lectures from Cambridge academics Drs Sara Baker and Jon Simons. Their lectures – ‘The non-academic skills that relate to school achievement’ and ‘What we know from Science about learning’ – explored how research from psychology is applied to learning. The lectures were part of a large-scale experiment to learn more about the human brain led by leading academic Prof. Bruce Hood from the University of Bristol.

Stuart Nicholson, CCSS Principal, said: “We were delighted and honoured that Sara and Jon gave up their time to come and talk to our students. Such an enormous amount has been learned in the last decade that the truth about the inner workings of the most complex organ in the body are not widely known, and Brain Awareness Week will begin to put that right.”