Bowfell Buttress with Langdale Primary School
Langdale Primary School adopts understands that everyone is an individual and each person will find what they are best at in life, they believe in giving each young person the opportunity to experience every thing they have to offer and to allow for further development for those who connect to topic.
At Real Adventure we take the Langdale kids out from an early age teaching them to do what we love in their back yard and afield, over the years we have been to the Dales for a week’s caving and rock climbing based residential, Ennerdale for the hill’s water and climbing, and to local crags. each young person has now done a good number of progressive taster climbing sessions.
Last year some of the team asked us if they could go Multi Pitch climbing on the crags they pass on their way to school each day so we built them up to the challenge and took a few of them up Middle Fell Buttress after a little training and risk assessing with Cathy.
2 of them that we took out may just be the next Dave Birket of the Lakes. Mark Squires asked me if I would be happy taking them up Bowfell Buttress.
Looking at the amount of climbing and hill walking they had done and remembering the skills they had picked up along the way I felt comfortable that they would be able to manage the day but only if the stars alined and it was perfect weather for them.
Today was the day, the two budding climbers and Cathy a well experienced climber (and their teacher from a really young age) and I headed to Brambles for a traditional bacon bun climbing start to the day before heading off up the valley to Stool End Farm and the long walk in up the Band.
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Delighted at this report. It is essential children learn about risk and adults can learn from this example olf how to introduce children to the careful planning needed and the procedures necessary to minimise risk. That state of mind underpins any kind of successful entrepreneurship, not least commercial. Langdale is a fine exampe of a small school setting high quality educational standards. The curriculum has always been outside school in the real world rather than textbooks. The academic and social goals of education are equally achievable outside the school walls and through interaction with the community. This is the best path to informed, participative citizenship and small schools across the UK set the example as inspectors and test results all show. We need to protect them from ill-informed closure decisions. Long-term they save money. Incidentally I have a similar picture of triumph when our Oxfordshire school party reached the top of Skiddaw when a sudden snow storm the previous day had made it more exciting still. Only a walk but for our village children still a challenge.