Jon Clarke, Shadow Headteacher at Walsall Academy
As a Geographer and person who has spent years in the mountains, I have always been fixated by Nepal. I have books, watched lots films and used it as a case study in my teaching. When I started to develop more and more learning outside the classroom (LOtC) in a school with high levels of deprivation in an inner city area, I wanted to inspire our students and community and break down some barriers – I wanted to take a group of young people to visit Nepal!
That was the original aim in 2017 for the first expedition I led to Everest and was exactly the same for the expedition in 2024. I had for several years been taking students on expeditions to Africa and Asia, building on the skills that the students had developed on week-long or weekend outdoor residential courses in the UK, but Nepal would be my ultimate goal.
The big question is...but why Everest?
I had big challenges of dealing with very low aspiration from the community, people saying “you won’t get kids form Bloxwich to do that!”. By choosing such a big expedition my core value was that kids from Bloxwich can go anywhere and they will be the example to others.
In 2017 we did manage to get to Everest and in 2019 to a peak in Kashmir. Then we all had to take a break for a couple of years and our big beacons to inspire students were losing their impact. Younger students did not know about LOtC or the expeditions.
Then the big expeditions kicked off again in 2023 when we took 24 students to Borneo. This was one of the largest groups we had ever taken and proved to be so very different from previous expeditions but a massive boost for the school.
We had recruited a team and had planned to go to Everest again in 2020 but this was not possible due to Covid. So the challenge was on to capitalise on the Borneo expedition and to see if we could get a team to Everest in 2024. The challenges were greater in terms of the finances and the skill set of the students. My other aim was to make sure that we were inclusive.
Walsall Academy has more children in local authority care than any other in the area and a high level compared nationally. I wanted to tap into the strengths of these young people I knew they had, having worked with them in the UK on residential courses, and give them opportunity to develop personally but also to be a role model for others.
Our original team was made up of 12 students, three of which were in local authority care and one student with a disability who loved the outdoors.
Fundraising
The cost for these expeditions, as you can imagine, is quite high but we were very fortunate in that a local trust fund, designed to enable young people in the area to do amazing things, stepped forward and funded 50% for all students.
Much of the learning for students of these experiences is the planning and preparation ahead of the actual expedition: the fund raising, working as team and organisation…the expedition itself is just the icing on the cake! So cars were washed, cakes were sold, letters written and talks given to raise money. Then, in late March, a group of 10 left for Nepal. (Sadly one of our LAC students was moved away from us and another student had an issue the day of travel and could not leave the country so we were down to a group of 10).
Developing skills for life
As a school we hold the Gold LOtC Mark award which we are very proud of and has required hard work, dedication and focus on the development of our students.
The expedition held these beliefs at its core and, as such, was managed by the students developing their leadership and project management skills. These core employability skills were developed during their fundraising to take part in the expedition and when making decisions – for example: the process of deciding how much money to tip the porters and expedition guides was just one of the difficult decisions the group had to make.
As a leader I stepped back and let the group manage themselves.
Clear values and forward planning
The students had set very clear values for their expedition during their training weekends and group development time ahead of travelling. They wanted to be role models for others and support local suppliers when in the country. The expedition was supported by Himalayan Ecstasy, a Kathmandu-based mountaineering company who provided the technical support needed by the students. Their owner, Anil Bathari, a twice Everest summiteer was with the team for the majority of the trek and had led the 2017 expedition. Anil captivated the students with his stories of summits and work on Everest but also taught us all so much about Nepal and its rich culture.
Determination, resilience and problem solving
We spent a total of 23 days trekking to Everest base at 5436m which was 91 miles of walking. We used roads rather then flying into the famous Lukhla airstrip and had to endure a 14 hour bus journey followed by 6 hours off road in jeeps to get to the base of the trek. All of this immersed the group more into Nepali culture and some areas not so often visited. The weather conditions in the previous month had also been poor and the roads had collapsed meaning more walking for the team.
Temperatures dropped to minus 13 at night and the students awoke to a blanket of snow on several mornings. The mountain landscape, however, did not disappoint and when the skies cleared and the sun came out the vista took away what remining breath the students had left.
Please do not think that this was an easy trek or that it all went without a hitch! We learnt more from what went wrong than what went right. There was illness and altitude sickness and not all of the team made it to base camp. There was friction in the group and we did have times when we needed to circle up and sort out a problem or two.
On the 3 April, 9 students along with myself and our UK expedition leader reached our goal! We did celebrate and then again when we had all the team together.
The expedition was so much more than the trek! The group made many new friends and learnt a great deal about other people. The whole team were inspired by the mountains and the scenery, but also shocked by how some people think that money can solve any issue, and the environmental impact of some other expedition teams.
More than just a trek!
The final few days of the expedition were spent in Kathmandu visiting the Dhurba Square, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which was devastated by the earthquake in 2015 and slowly starting to adjust to life back with running water and electricity. After 19 days with no showers some of the group needed it more than others.
We arrived back on Sunday 14 April at 5pm and at 7.30am the next morning I was sat back at my desk in school, tired but having that warm fuzzy feeling about what we had all just achieved.
Watch the short video below and be inspired by the amazing achievement of our students and of this life-changing LOtC experience…
I cannot write a blog without some meaningful quote from a student, because it really was their expedition not mine. Mia wrote me a thank you card a few days after our return, it is now in my office and will motivate me for years to come.
“I did not imagine on year 7 Outward Bound that a few years later I would be going to Everest Basecamp. Neither did I realise that impact you have on so many young people’s lives in the best way possible. I would like to say thank you for making me realise that I am stronger than I thought and truly showing me what resilience is and encouraging me to never give up.”
This blog post was written by:
Jon Clarke, Shadow Headteacher at Walsall Academy.
Jon is a Churchill Fellow and published articles on the use of Expeditionary Learning, developing a project which he manages across three schools, and completed over 125 course at The Outward Bound Trust. He is an advocate of learning outside the classroom and takes part in many of the courses offered by the Academy. The Academy has developed a strong character education ethos and provides its students with a very wide variety of experiences from theatre visits and museum visits to a well developed series of courses with The Outward Bound Trust to all year groups. Walsall Academy is a CLOtC Gold LOtC Mark award school.
