New Sixth Form course: Living with the Land

An article in the i newspaper discusses the new Bedales Living with the Land qualification course.

Bedales is well known for BACs (Bedales Assessed Courses) – the school’s established range of homegrown alternative GCSE-level courses, characterised by imaginative subjects and diverse assessment methods. Now, Living with the Land builds upon the school’s longstanding commitment to Outdoor Work as the school’s first homegrown A Level alternative programme.

The main topics within the course will be shelter, food and craft. In the shelter module students will be taught how to construct buildings with natural materials, whilst the food module features cooking with seasonal ingredients and making items such as butter, cheese, bacon and pickles. The craft module includes blacksmithing, working wool, animal husbandry, woodwork, gardening and land care – such as managing hedgerows and coppicing.

Magnus Bashaarat, Head of Bedales, explains that the course spans sustainability, permaculture, biological science, and farming ethically and sustainably; and that it reflects young people’s burgeoning interest in these subjects.

The course, starting in September 2020, will provide a Sixth Form extension to the school’s popular Outdoor Work BAC, and Magnus explains that a priority is to see the course accredited by Ofqual. He says: “We want to demonstrate that this is a rigorous, well-assessed, well-written and secure course. We then want to be able to say to other schools that here is a course that is to do with outdoor experiential learning, and completely answers the need of the moment’”.

The full article can be read on the i newspaper website.