Fish go to School
Pupil 1: (girl with headband) This is a story about when fish go to school.
Pupil 1 & 2: (boy with blonde curls) It’s all about trout!
Acting headteacher: The project we’ve been involved in for the last three years is called Fish go to School. The aim of the project is to give children experience of rearing trout – the whole way through from egg to fish fry, which are then released in the river.
Pupil 3: (girl with brown hair) The numbers of brown trout, over the years, have been carrying on falling, so we decided we would do something to help. We reared brown trout in a hatchery in our classroom from when they were just eggs and watched them grown. When they were old enough, we then released them into our local burn.
Countryside ranger: The main aims of the project are to raise awareness of river ecology and human impact upon river systems.
Pupil 4: (girl with strawberry blonde hair) The project took around 2-3 months. Working with Clyde River Foundation, the Countryside Rangers and the Biodiversity Co-ordinator, we found out about the life history of a trout and the geography, ecology and history of the river that we released the trout into.
A shared agenda
Countryside ranger: The Fish go to School project was originally set up to raise awareness amongst school pupils, of river ecology; in terms of the wildlife and interactions with the habitats and the human intervention – that what they do, within the river itself and within the area of the river, impacts on fish breeding, habitats for fish breeding and numbers.
Pupil 4: (small boy with glasses) Originally, there were hundreds of brown trout in the River Devon, but recently they’ve started to die because of pollution and all of the litter that’s been blowing into the small burns.
Countryside ranger: Brown trout, especially, which is what Fish go to School focuses on, are declining in number and a lot of that struggle is down to human intervention and the pressures placed on fish stocks.
Pupil 4: (small boy with glasses) The Fish go to School project fitted in with Eco-friendliness because it was helping us conserve our local area by hatching these small fish, so that, hopefully, there will be more brown trout in the area.
Pupil 1: (girl with headband) Eggs, fry and alevin need certain things to stay alive. In your tank you must provide; air pump and air stone for oxygen, water filter and de-chlorinated water for clean water, pebbles for shelter and ice packs for cold water.
Acting headteacher: The technology behind the project was very basic, but, I think, very sophisticated in how it worked because the children had a very fine degree of control of the temperature of the water.
Partnerships in practice
Enterprise development officer: The Fish go to School project is an authority-wide project which we are now in our third year of working with. We work with a variety of partnerships and agencies; from the Glasgow Science Centre through to Scottish National Heritage, and our local public and private sectors as well.
Manager – Clyde River Foundation: My name is Willie Yeomans and I’m the Catchment Manager with the Clyde River Foundation, which is a charity based in the University of Glasgow, and Fish go to School is part of our education programme. The plan for our project is that we have launch days at the Science Centre in Glasgow and we will take the children and the teachers to the Science Centre for a couple of introductory lectures.
The first one is a lecture on the local river, here, in particular, the River Devon or the Black Devon, and its fishery and the fish and the history of that river and we introduce the children to the concept of ecosystems and form the point of view of what fish eat, what eats fish, what do you need to keep fish alive, pollution…
Enterprise development officer: The pupils then link up with agencies such as the countryside rangers the local biodiversity officers and, in some cases, the local fishing group and talk about how you need to keep your fish, look after your fish, and also where the fish are going to be released.
Manager – Clyde River Foundation: We explain to them what it is you need to keep trout alive in a river – trout eggs in particular. And we explain that they need to be kept cold, they need shelter, they need oxygen in the water, they need a bit of darkness…
Enterprise development officer: What happens then is that the equipment comes to school and that causes great excitement! They're each assigned a role and have a responsibility to look after and help hatch hundreds of eggs.
Pupil 1: (girl with headband) Eggs, fry and alevin need certain things to stay alive. In your tank you must provide; air pump and air stone for oxygen, water filter and de-chlorinated water for clean water, pebbles for shelter and ice packs for cold water.
Acting headteacher: The technology behind the project was very basic, but, I think, very sophisticated in how it worked because the children had a very fine degree of control of the temperature of the water.
Pupil 2: (boy with blonde curls) From zero to seven [degrees Celsius], it will be ok but the fish will take a long time to grow. From seven to twelve it’s really good and you should keep it at that. From twelve to fifteen it’s getting warm and you need to add more ice, and from fifteen to twenty it’s too hot.
Pupil 4: (small boy with glasses) Seeing the metamorphosis from the fishes' eggs into the actual fish is quite amazing because at first you see them as eggs and then you see this little head popping out.
Manager – Clyde River Foundation: What the children are seeing in these little tanks – in these little hatcheries with a few stones and a few fish eggs – nobody ever sees this in the wild, because this happens maybe 5 …10 centimetres down in the gravel, under the riverbed.
Pupil 4: (small boy with glasses) When we went to release the fish we were taken up by Mr Yeomans and a Countryside Ranger to the area where we were going to release them.
Countryside ranger 2: As Countryside Rangers our job, really, came in when the children were thinking about where they could release the fish. So, we were looking at the kind of burns that we could release them into, looking at different qualities within the burns; how fast the river flowed, the kind of insects that lived within the water that would provide food for the fish. So, just trying to get the kids to have a look at the burns and see whether they thought it would be a suitable place, a good place, to put their precious fish back into.
Manager – Clyde River Foundation: These fish will establish in the burn, potentially. And they will live out their lives for three, four or five years in that burn.
Pupil 4: (small boy with glasses) The burn that we released the fish into actually went straight through the middle of our school. So, every so often you will see fish coming under the bridge that connects the two halves of the school together. We all think that we released them, that they are our fish. By us releasing those eggs, we have helped the conservation of our local area.
The bigger picture
Pupil 5 points to a diagram (girl with tied brown hair): This fin here is called the cordal fin.
Pupil 6 points to a diagram (girl with headband and blonde hair): This fin here is called the dorsal fin.
Pupil 5 points to a diagram (girl with tied brown hair): This is the eye.
Pupil 6 points to a diagram (girl with headband and blonde hair): This is the mouth.
Pupil 5 points to a diagram (girl with tied brown hair): And that’s the gill cover.
Acting headteacher: Of course, with a project like this there are lots of cross-curricular links. Science is an obvious one – the children are actually rearing the young from live eggs, they are looking at a complete life cycle.
Manager – Clyde River Foundation: We have had some fairly creative outputs from the children that have been involved in this over the years. We’ve had rap songs, we’ve had poems, we’ve had plays, we’ve had a lot of prose work and a lot of art. Obviously, the fish lend themselves to art.
Acting headteacher: The children made displays of the life cycle, they kept log books which they illustrated, of how their fish were doing.
Pupil 7 talks to fellow pupils: (Girl with black hair and black shirt) If it was too cold then they would live but it might be too cold and take longer for them to hatch. And if it got too hot…
Manager – Clyde River Foundation: Mathematical skills, arithmetical skills – making graphs of temperature, or maybe the number of dead eggs or fish you take out every day.
Acting headteacher: They were involved in a lot of language work because they were not only keeping daily logs but they were writing reports, they were writing letters to people to keep them up to speed. I think some children decided to write some poems about trout.
Pupil 3: (girl with brown hair) Our writing skills were also improved. We had to write lots of letters to people who we wanted to come and see us. We wanted some people to come and help us with things, we wanted the local newspapers to get involved.
Acting headteacher: IT was another big component, not only for the search that the children did into the project but they elected to do a PowerPoint presentation to share their work with the rest of the school. But also, to display to a wider audience at an enterprise fair which was run by Clackmannanshire Council.
Manager – Clyde River Foundation: The project isn’t about a load of old scientists standing on a riverbank talking to children. This is about encouraging children to develop and to take ownership of something.
Pupil 4: (small boy with glasses) This enterprise helps your learning an awful lot because it opens up an awful lot of doors to different subjects when you're just doing one subject in reality.
Pupil 8: (girl with necklace) One of the most important projects is teamwork – like listening, helping each other out, solving problems together.
Acting headteacher: It was an ideal opportunity to set up a lot of group work for children. It was extremely rewarding for a lot of children, you know. They had a real role to play in this.
Skills for life
Enterprise development officer: We have a variety of skills and attitudes that are developed through this programme (focusing mainly on things like teambuilding, self-esteem, confidence…) and, therefore, it hits all the four capacities within the Curriculum for Excellence.
Acting headteacher: We, as a school and a group of teachers, felt that this project provided an excellent context for children to acquire or achieve the capacities to become successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors.
Pupil 3: (girl with brown hair) As the whole class was involved, you had to make sure we all got a turn. We had to work in teams to take care of the fish.
Manager – Clyde River Foundation: There is a large element of problem solving involved in this, which is when the children understand that the fish cannot, for instance, survive above fifteen degrees centigrade and they have to work out how often then have to change the ice bottles every day to keep the temperature at its ideal [level].
Pupil 1: (girl with headband) One of the reasons [that] this project has worked for me is because it really built up my confidence. I've been given the responsibility to look after the fish and I know I can do it.
Acting headteacher: They were very keen to share what they had learnt with their peers but, also, with other adults. They were very willing to assume responsibility for their part of the project.
Pupil 4: (girl with strawberry blonde) One of the reasons this project has been a success for me is [that it has] helped with my independence.
Pupil 4: (small boy with glasses) It allows you to be more confident because you will have to talk to more people. The conservationists, the Countryside Rangers, the Biodiversity Officer and this confidence allows you to do this.
Manager – Clyde River Foundation: We are actually talking about the natural environment here, and this project is an excellent mechanism for that because it’s interesting. You show people live animals, you let them develop – it doesn’t get any better than that for a lot of children. And our job, as scientists, is to try and keep that interest up and develop the citizenship side of it so that you don’t fly tip in the lay-by by the river (or anywhere else, indeed) and you don’t throw your coke cans in the river, you don’t throw glass in the river.
Pupil 4: (small boy with glasses) By releasing in these fish, you're allowing them to have a new chance – a better chance of surviving. So, by doing this you are a really good citizen to your area.
A win-win outcome
Acting headteacher:One of the big things about Enterprise Education is the partnerships we establish.
Manager – Clyde River Foundation: The enterprise side of this is very, very important and the coming together of professional people in the schools … there is a great deal of value to be gained and added – not just to the children, but also to the participating partners, like ourselves. That’s the essence, I think; the absolute essence and the kernel of partnership learning.
Pupil 3: (girl with brown hair) Other schools could learn from what we’ve done. It doesn’t take a lot of equipment and things, but it does take a lot of care and responsibility.
Acting headteacher: For me the key outcomes have been that the children thoroughly enjoyed this project. They understood the reasons for what they were doing. They were very, very keen to share what they were doing; to share the knowledge and the information.
Enterprise development officer: Fish go to School is a brilliant example of an enterprise project. We’ve got pupils who are taking ownership of their learning – they sit down and they highlight the targets that they want to achieve. Every pupil has an activity, has a role that they have to take part in – so it’s totally inclusive.
Countryside ranger: They are starting to appreciate the impact that their actions can have on the rivers, especially the burn that runs through the school here and the wildlife and ecology that lives within those rivers.
Acting headteacher: One nice thing for the children was that, in fact, they had one of the highest survival rates – one of the lowest mortality rates for their trout-rearing project.
Enterprise Development Officer: Their independence, their drive, their creativity is developed through this project in the cross-curricular links that are available to them.
Manager – Clyde River Foundation: There are other organisations throughout the community that will have a great deal to offer schools and to get the children motivated and involved in their particular business or activity. And we think, in particular, one of the most important things about this is to actually get the children outside and get them to see what we do.
Acting headteacher: It was a project that wasn’t a bolt-on, standalone project, it fitted in very naturally and easily into our existing programmes of work. It addressed a lot of the curricular needs and I felt it really took forward the development of the four competences of our children.
Pupil 3: (girl with brown hair) For me, Fish go to School was the best project that I’ve ever done in primary. It was different to anything I’d ever done and it’s something that will stick in my mind forever.
Pupil 4: (small boy with glasses) It really fitted in well with our Eco-friendliness because it gave us the final push for us to get our Green Flag and Alva was one of the first schools to get the Green Flag in Central Scotland.
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