Salfords Primary students have sky-high ambition after aerodrome visit

Blue sky thinking was the order of the day at Salfords Primary School in Redhill after Year Five pupils paid a trip to the local aerodrome.

The visit incorporated all aspects of the curriculum, from art classes sketching the buildings to statistics exercises based on details of aerodrome visitors and traffic.

“An aerodrome is a fascinating place, with something going on to interest absolutely everyone, so it was a particularly great place for the pupils to spend the day,” said Salfords teacher Gareth Llewelyn, who was in charge of the trip.

“There’s so much more to the place than just aeroplanes landing and taking off – it’s somewhere that makes a real difference to the local community, from the buildings and the landscape to the jobs it creates and the way it literally puts our town on the map, so speaking as a teacher, it’s a fascinating learning resource.”

The outing was one of the first undertaken by Salfords Primary School since it joined the GLF Schools group last July. GLF is a rapidly-expanding Surrey-based multi-academy trust which now runs over a dozen schools across four counties, from new-build primaries to long-established secondary schools, based on a system of collaborative learning.

For all the aerodrome’s many facets, however, unsurprisingly it was something most at the core of its work – the flight simulator – that proved to be the highlight of the day for many of the pupils.

“We’d done some role play exercises about incidents which might occur during a flight and how to react to them, but it was the chance to experience being a pilot that really caught the imagination,” Mr Llewelyn explained. 

“The simulator gave them a chance to spend four minutes at the controls, experiencing take-off and landing, and also viewing their local landscape from above, so they came away from the experience with a different point of view – literally – from the one they went in with. What more can you ask for from a school visit?”