Foreword.

This project has been designed to positively challenge school policy makers and curriculum leaders. This projects allows children to investigate an area of learning that they view as valuable.
This project will discover if two things are possible:
1. Can children in Key stage One effectively research and understand their own learning journeys.
2. Will those adults making the most important decisions in schools, listen to and act on the implications draw out from child initiated and conducted research.

Fortunately for The Gearies Poetry Researchers, Gearies Infants School holds these such creative risks in high esteem, with the child central to its ethos. However, this might not be the case elsewhere. My interest in this project is to see if it really is possible for a child autonomous research project to take place in Key stage One.

If this is possible, where else could this journey take us?

Can we create a focus group of schools that develops child research projects, sharing as practitioners and facilitators the implications and impacts of the different projects, drawing together a generic system for initiating child lead research. In effect, challenging those that make the big decisions to listen to the small but very switched on voices of our children. This is a very exciting and powerful possibility. Hopefully, a very real one, soon to be discovered.

So, it is at this point that I now hand the Blog over to a group of 14 children, aged six, to conduct and publish their own project.

Dan Lea. AST: Creativity in Key stage One and The Early Years.