Ocean Literacy for disabled children - take two!

Pegasus

A couple of years ago John an MCS Sea Champion and education volunteer shared a post about fostering Ocean Literacy in disabled children through sailing in the Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter, Cornubia. The post (read here) described taking them out for a day sailing in the River Tamar and in Plymouth Sound looking at the wildlife on and under the pontoons at Mayflower Marina. Now John is back with a different boat but the work is more important than ever.  

Since my last post, the big change is that Cornubia has gone to the East Coast, and the sailing trips are now done in The Island Trust’s traditionally rigged boats, Pegasus (Pegasus.jpg) or Tectona (Tectona.jpg) based in Plymouth Yacht Haven. The children come from the same schools, the programme on board is virtually identical, and I transferred from one charity to the other to deliver it. It was important to reassure the providing schools that a different charity using different boats was able to deliver what they had come to expect. 

Tectona

In the longer term, in order to continue to get existing and additional schools’ participation and funding from previous and new grant-giving charities we would need to be able to prove that were doing at least as well as in Cornubia. So it was a good thing that we had set up a performance measurement system in 2013 and were able to transfer it from one organisation to the other. It is less comprehensive and complex than the system The Island Trust uses for their usual residential trips, but they immediately saw the advantage of being able to compare like with like and were happy to use what is a very simple feedback mechanism.

We wanted a system independent of things outside the control of the children and their carers. So using the scores in our guide would only have worked if we could see pretty much the same things on each trip, which we couldn’t. And we wanted the same system for all levels of ability. What we have is based on the “Full Value” model, set out in “True Colours – Uncovering the full value of your organisation.” See https://www.ncvo.org.uk/component/redshop/1-publications/P67-true-colours.

There are four elements of full value:

• Primary Outcomes
• Secondary Outcomes
• Primary Satisfaction
• Secondary Satisfaction

We define our primary stakeholders as the children themselves, and although the potential range of secondary stakeholders is huge, we limit it to the parents, teachers, teaching assistants or carers who come on board with the children. That way we can measure the elements in the same way and on the day. The outcome for both is learning: do they know more after the trip than before. And satisfaction is “did they enjoy it?”

Life beneath the keel - a settlement plate

At the start of the day, once we’ve got them on the pontoon and close to the boat, but before I start telling them about “Life Beneath The Keel,” we ask the children and their carers to rate how much they think they know about the marine environment and maritime activities on a scale of 1 - 9. They remember this number and once on board they tick the appropriate box on the front of the feedback form. At the end of the day, using the back of the form we ask the same question. We also ask them whether they enjoyed their day using a smiley, neutral or frowning face and for a few words on what they think they got out of it.

To report on the full year’s outcomes I average the before and after scores. The disadvantage of this is that it hides the really valuable learning outcome of discovering you don’t know as much as you thought you did, so the second score is lower than the first – and it does happen. It also fails to capture those who rate their new level of knowledge as 10/9 – as 4 children from one school did.

As the numerical assessments in the table below show, there were improvements in outcomes, secondary satisfaction stayed at 100% and there was a slight drop in primary satisfaction (fewer children enjoyed their day) mostly due to failures to record their views.

Summary of performance monitoring statistics

Outcomes – Averages of levels of knowledge

Knowledge (1-9)    Marine - pre            Maritime - pre        Marine - post          Maritime - post

2013

Children (n=80)       4.84                            4.69                           6.49                            6.25

Adults (n=55)           4.85                            5.05                           6.87                            6.60

2014

Children (n=62)       4.02                            3.90                           6.13                            6.07

Adults (n=39)           4.72                            4.95                           6.85                            6.72

2015

Children (n=97)       4.37                            3.24                           6.29                            6.31

Adults (n=47)           5.14                            5.38                           7.05                            7.13

2016

Children (n=119)     4.31                            4.28                           6.24                            6.44

Adults (n=54)           4.73                            4.92                           6.77                            6.88

2017

Children (n=100)     4.74                            4.50                           6.78                            6.67

Adults (n=38)           4.67                            5.23                           7.20                            7.00

Satisfaction

2013

Children                                                        100

Adults                                                            100

2014

Children                                                        97[1]

Adults                                                            100

2015

Children                                                        96[2]

Adults                                                            100

2016

Children                                                        97[3]

Adults                                                            100

2017

Children                                                        93[4]

Adults                                                            100

We started doing this in Cornubia in 2010 and took over 650 children their carers, teachers or parents. In 2017 in Tectona we helped over 100 more to see the sea differently.

So we must be getting something right. Narrative comments bear this out. Rhiannon, from Plymstock school, said, “I enjoyed it all. I now know why the seaweed is a different colour. It was amazing.” What did Anne-Marie, a teaching assistant from Pencalenick school think her charges had got out of their day? “Team building. Lots of knowledge about the sea. The students grew in confidence and it was nice to see them interacting with each other when they don't usually choose to at school. A great day, thank you.” The mother of one of the students commented via the website, “My son George has just taken part on a day’s sailing on board the 'Tectona'. He is 16 and has high functioning autism. He came back absolutely full of passion and excitement after today. So lovely to see as he doesn't get involved in many activities due to his anxiety.”

We know some teachers follow up in the classroom what their students have learnt on board, but it’s very difficult to get a handle on this. I’ve offered some of the teachers a “Cool Seas” session, but in spite of enthusiasm on the day, none of them has come back suggesting a date. More work needed there, I think. However, on a couple of occasions when it was too windy to go to sea, I had a copy of the “Aliens of the Deep” presentation on my laptop so I could run the activity and the learners were able to design their own aliens on the blank page in the guide. 

Plymstock school's Aliens of the Deep

The Island Trust is a bigger charity, and has a head of fund raising, but I still help applying for grants for these trips. In the first year, 2017 we called the project, “The Cornubia Legacy,” but now, rather than look backwards, it is “Ocean Discoverability.” A big change for me was that I became responsible for programming all the trips 2017, keeping the old schools in the scheme and looking for new ones to join and scheduling them. Herding cats! The swing to that roundabout was that with The Island Trust boats having permanent crew I was no longer first mate, which freed me up to look after the educational element of the day more, and to talk to the teachers about ways of improving it. They do let me pull the occasional rope.

Part of what made the Cornubia trips different to other sailing trips was the marine biology element, and with the transfer of the microscope, TV etc, this too continued. The marine life growing on the pontoons at Plymouth Yacht Haven is not as rich as it is at Mayflower Marina, but there were always enough mussels to show barnacles, keel worms and sea mat feeding, and types of sea weeds to demonstrate their variety of form and colour.

Sea mat feeding

The baited recoverable underwater video (BRUV) showed life on the seabed there. Unlike at Mayflower there are always shore crabs, and seeing them squabbling over the bait is a huge hit. We were all quite excited by the battle between a large velvet swimming crab, with big sharp claws, and a smaller shore crab, especially as the smaller crab won, to be joined by all the other shore crabs, who then did what they do best, squabbling over the bait. (Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtqV3B1NAGc) . Trawling for plankton and looking at it under the microscope is just as popular and helps with mobility and team work as well as having educational value.

Shore crab takes on velvet swimming crab

Vertical plankon trawl

Coscinodiscus sp. prob wailesii, a diatrom & shrimp larva

That it works, and is transferrable is, I think, now clear. So, at the SW Marine Ecosystem Conference this year I presented on the opportunity that Sail Training presents for promoting Ocean Literacy. I hope this will kick off a process aimed at providing sail trainers with a tool kit of activities they can fit into their voyage plans which will add further value to the experience they are giving the young people that sail with them. There might even be a role for Sea Champions. Wouldn’t it be great if we could show more recreational sea users how amazing the marine environment is?