'Tomorrow's World' has come to Fairfield High School in Peterchurch with an innovative scheme which allows all of a year's science pupils to be taught in one super-size class, benefiting from the talents of three of the school's science teachers. The do-it-yourself, state-of-the-art science block looks set to help maintain the school's excellent exam record in science subjects as former Fairfield pupil ANITA HOWELLS discovered.

A CHILD with its hand eagerly waving in the air sparked a brainwave between two teachers in opposite labs.

Over the pupil's head the booming voices of Fairfield High School's Paul Brereton and Mike Walker carried across the classes.

It was an unseen fizzling and crackling that led to an educational eureka and the fusion of three classrooms as Mr Brereton answered the child's question from next door.

"We should do this," Mr Brereton had thought. Now the pupils are all taught together in what is probably the biggest school science laboratory in Herefordshire.

It defies all modern teaching approaches, 60 children, an entire year, all in one class and with no streaming.

But the new suite at the Peterchurch high school, a beacon school partly due to its appliance of science, is drawing attention from other county schools.

From its inception, it was a first. "It started because we both had loud voices and we could hear each other from our classrooms. One day a child put up their hand in Mike's lesson and I answered the question. We started with combined lessons in one of the old science labs but it was too cramped and some experiments were too dangerous," said Mr Brereton, who has taught at Fairfield for 17 years.

Now they share their expertise in one class: "It was one of those lucky accidents. We knew we needed extra laboratory space. A school inspector had identified Fairfield as being one of the top six priority schools, but it was going to be difficult for the county to afford and we didn't want to wait," said Mr Brereton, also the school's deputy head and site manager.

So they built their own science suite. They joined together the former history, drama and computer rooms, creating one state-of-the-art facility.

All the work was done by a group of lads on the school's vocational building course. They knocked through adjoining walls, gutted the rooms, joined them together and decorated too.

On Monday morning the school's entire year eight was being taught by the two teachers, plus new teacher Jane Wright who was demonstrating an experiment to check the upper fixed point of boiling water. The pupils are to make their own thermometers next.

The teachers operate like a triple act; one demonstrating, one helping at desks and work stations and the other surfing the net for moving illustrations.

The water boiling exercise was part of a project on the combustion engine. Computer images on the suite's white board brought it all to life with a moving diagram.

Mr Brereton, who was funded by the DFE to investigate alternative classroom sizes, says the large group works like clockwork. While one group carries out traditional experiments using Bunsen burners and conventional thermometers another uses the suite's data logging computers and electronic thermometers, so methods can be compared.

Flexible approach

"We can work with big groups or very small ones depending on requirements and with three teachers we are flexible.

"Over the last two years 25 per cent have achieved an A* grade for sciences, so we are not disadvantaging children. Special needs pupils are doing better in science than any other department in school. Some pupils have left with only science GCSE's," added Mr Brereton."

As a beacon school the formula is available for other schools to observe. It could be the 'Tomorrow's World' of county education.