Abstract

The Children’s University describes itself as ‘a national organisation that provides 7 to 14 year olds with exciting and innovative learning activities and experiences outside normal school hours’. It is that but much more. Under its Chief Executive Ger Graus, it now encompasses over 70 affiliated centres nationwide and caters to over 85,000 children whose total engagement with ‘out-of-hours learning’ totals one million and 75 thousand hours. Many of those hours are spent not in school but in ‘learning destinations’ (Over 100 accredited learning destinations including the Houses of Parliament, Shakespeare 4Kidz, Benjamin Franklin House, Canterbury Cathedral, Manchester City F.C., the Woodland Trust, Fondazione Pallazo Strozzi in Florence). These centres are accredited by the CU as providing structured challenging experiences, each visit endorsed in children’s learning passports and counting towards graduation. The 2010 evaluation which compared achievement of CU children with a non-CU comparison group showed highly significant gains is attendance, attainment and attitudes to learning.