Miss Faye Jenkins
Teaching Awards 2008 Winner
The SSAT Award for Outstanding New Teacher of the Year in East
Glastonbury Thorn School, MILTON KEYNES
This teacher’s pupils learn maths in the playground by tossing hoops over cones. They learn to write by drawing in coloured sand, and they learn about life through all kinds of role-play.
Despite having been teaching for only two years, Faye Jenkins is already creativity-plus. She is the outstanding leader of art, design and creativity in a school that already has a high reputation for creative learning, and has even had a best-seller written about its approaches.
In her classroom she uses a plethora of teaching styles, from demonstrations to partnerships, to help pupils learn. The room resounds to claps and cries of delight as children acquire new skills and knowledge. One parent calls her “fab, fab and fab again.”
Faye plans her lessons in great detail in order to create a climate where her pupils feel free to think for themselves and make independent decisions. This helps them acquire crucial management and communication skills. “Every child in my class is gifted and talented,” she says. “It’s just my job to find out where.”
She is always keen to extend her skills, and has asked to teach a lower age group in order to fully understand the differences between the Foundation Stage and Year One. As a result she has created some superb resources, and become known as an expert in helping children make the transition from a play-based curriculum to more formal learning.
As art leader she has organised a whole-school art week, where pupils worked with a professional artist, and she creates stunning displays of children’s work in school.
Faye was a nursery nurse before training as a teacher, and now helps train other new teachers.“A wonderful, very sensitive, caring, and natural teacher,” says a parent, whose child used to struggle with school but now, with Faye Jenkins as her teacher, “skips to class every morning.”
