Dallam School and Sixth Form is ideally located for the coast, mountains and lakes, but we are also not far from being able to access major cultural organisations in the north of England. Now that the dark days of lockdown are hopefully behind us for good, we have been taking the opportunity to enrich our students’ learning with much-missed school trips.
In January, our English and Music departments arranged trips to Greater Manchester.
Our Year 11 students have been studying JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls as one of their set texts for GCSE English Literature this year. 90 students and their teachers went to watch a National Theatre production of the play at the Lowry Theatre in Salford. It was an innovative and lively production, which received a resounding thumbs-up from our students, whose behaviour was a credit to the school.
29 pupils from Years 9, 10 and 11 visited Bridgewater Hall in Manchester City to see the Hallé’s performance titled The Orchestra Through The Ages. The concert took our students on a guided tour of music from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century. Featuring a number of orchestral pieces from the AQA, OCR, WJEC and Edexcel syllabi for GCSE and A-level music, the concert demonstrated the development of the symphony orchestra with a brief history and musical analysis of some key pieces. Amongst these pieces was the final movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, one of the study pieces for our GCSE Music qualification.
The pupils were exemplary in their behaviour and thoroughly enjoyed the concert. Some of them later recalled becoming quite emotional at seeing and listening to some of the pieces. – Mr Parker, Head of Creative Arts