Hill Crest School, Exmouth, EX8 4ED

Having taught in both primary and secondary schools I have spent the last ten years at Hill Crest teaching boys aged ten to sixteen years of age with emotional and behaviour difficulties. I am co-ordinator for Art and English. My main interest is in the visual arts and firmly believe in the importance of the Arts as a means of improving self esteem and modifying behaviour problems.

I hope that the Crossings project will stimulate an interest in our pupils to discover and understand a culture that is different from their own. I intend setting up a whole school, cross curricula scheme of work based on South Africa, the core of which will be visual arts. During my visit, therefore I would like to make contact with a Township school which would be interested in corresponding without pupils. I am also interested in discovering as much as I can about South African Arts, Literature and Drama together with a knowledge of South Africa's history and culture.

Hill Crest is an attractive building situated in extensive grounds, surrounded by tall trees. We cater for 42 pupils of average and above intelligence, many of whom have been out of school for sometime and are therefore often behind in basic skills and need help getting back into the ethos of learning. We have five classes, two of nine pupils and three of eight. Most pupils come to us having been excluded from mainstream schools due to their emotional and behaviour difficulties. The boys are brought in on Monday mornings by taxi and are residential for the week. Hill Crest provides a twenty four hour curriculum with lessons during the school days and a variety of supervised activities after school. ON Friday afternoons they are collected again by taxi and returned home. The school's aims are to give pupils strategies for coping with their problems and to ensure that they have access to a broad and varied curriculum and that they leave school with as many G.C.S.E. examinations as possible.