News

A selection of our Year 12 students have recently participated in a number of workshops run by The Crown Estate.

It was a wonderful opportunity for the students to experience and to gain knowledge and skills whilst designing plans for a new development in East Hemel.

One of our Year 12 students, Laurie Anne P, offers her perspective on these insightful sessions:

“Throughout our sessions with The Crown Estate, they had covered these 3 key elements: interdisciplinary learning, challenges that impact various aspects of life and leadership.

Our first session centred around the idea of relating one branch of knowledge to another and how we can utilise this process to discover areas of weakness and how to solve these problems in the long term. In our case, we as sixth form students were given the opportunity to reimagine what East Hemel Hempstead would be like in the next couple of decades and how we could propose new innovative ideas that could not only aid the community now but also the community of the future!

Over the following weeks, in groups we honed in on specific details that need to be considered when building new establishments and upgrading old utilities. Moreover, the effects on the environment, transport, homes and community - with all these in mind, we brainstormed various ways in which we can interlink each of these aspects of life.

For instance, one of the activities was to visualise what aspects you notice on your travels to school. This exercise required me to really focus on specific details that would impact me on a day-to-day basis; perhaps it was the smooth terrain I walked on or the beautiful cherry blossom tree I saw at the end of my path or maybe even just the stray cats I saw every so often. You can apply this intense sense of thinking towards anything! Giving me a taste of how we can use interdisciplinary thinking to help plan for the future as well as in daily life.

We then were able to present our initial thoughts with other groups, being able to magpie creative suggestions or just listening to what intriguing outlooks the rest have when presented with the same situation.

This experience has helped me to develop a broader understanding of complex problems by drawing insights from multiple different fields and perspectives.”