When he was appointed as deputy head at Brickhouse, and heard what the head, Colin Hocknull, wanted of him, he thought it sounded crazy. But just half a term into putting the ideas into practice he declares himself, “amazed, gob-smacked” at the results. His class had a very rough year last year, with many changes of teacher, but is already producing the level of work that he and Hocknull had been hoping to see by next summer.”Accelerated learning refocuses teachers’ attention away from teaching and towards learning,” he says. “The children are so enthusiastic – they can see what’s in it for them, and you can use it with everyone…from kids who are statemented [because of special educational needs], to the most able.”"We’ve had a nursery nurse come back from maternity leave ,” says Hocknull. “And she immediately said, ‘What’s going on? It feels different.’ ” And an evening meeting where the school introduced the new ideas to parents went an hour and a half over time – everyone wanted to stay and talk.Accelerated learning, as any child in Cobane’s class could explain, is nothing to do with hot-housing bright kids, but a new way of approaching learning. It is based on what is known about how the brain works, about attention and motivation, and about different learning styles.

It gets children to use the analytical and creative sides of their brain in a relaxed but alert atmosphere specifically designed to foster learning.It came to Brickhouse because Hocknull had a problem. Before he arrived, the school, which serves a sizeable council estate, was failing. He had turned that around, and Ofsted praised much of the school’s teaching, but attainment levels were still low. “I asked myself, if the teaching’s so good, why aren’t we doing better?” When he saw accelerated learning in another school, he felt he had found the answer.The process begins by creating a climate where children feel secure and positive about learning. This includes things like inspirational posters, and more subtle things like how teachers speak to pupils and structure the things they ask them to do. It can also include making water available in classrooms so tiny brains don’t dehydrate, handing out “brain food” such as bananas, playing music (Handel’s Water Music for concentration; The Flight of the Bumblebee for tidying up) and using stretches and songs, often with a cross-lateral component (stretching to touch your knee with your elbow), to refresh and wake up the brain.It emphasises a style of teaching where learning is always connected to what has gone before, and is constantly previewed and reviewed.

It also emphasises allowing children to learn through seeing, hearing and doing. Many boys, for example, appear to learn primarily by feeling and doing, and make much better progress if this is taken into account.The package creates fervent disciples, and most teachers immediately see the sense of it. Helen Hamer, a director of Alite (Accelerated Learning in Training and Education), a company founded by one of the gurus of “brain-based” learning, Alistair Smith, says that their training days always produce hall-fulls of heads nodding in agreement – not least because accelerated learning formalises many of the things good teachers already do by instinct.So why aren’t these ideas taking the British educational world by storm – especially as they have been around for more than a decade, and are already well-known in Australia, New Zealand and the United States? A big problem is that unless they take root deep in a school’s daily life, enthusiasm can fizzle out quickly. A primary school in Surrey which hit the headlines seven years ago for embracing accelerated learning, for example, now no longer has any teachers who know much about it.Another problem is that it can be easy to pick up only the sexy bits of the story, then be disheartened when a banana, a bottle of water and a Mozart symphony fail to revolutionise a class’s performance.But all that is changing fast as evidence for the success of “brain-based” learning grows, and more and more schools adopt part, or all, of one of the models now on offer.”We’ve just finished a two-year action research study into how schools can help learners to learn,” says Toby Greany, director of the charity, The Campaign for Learning. “We looked at a variety of things going on in 24 schools and there is definitely emerging evidence that these things raise attainments.” The campaign found that they had a huge impact on teacher morale and motivation, and now wants initial teacher training courses to contain more on how humans learn, and the factors that encourage or inhibit learning.Alite agrees about their impact, pointing to schools such as Cramlington Community High School, in Northumbria, which has been following accelerated learning ideas for five years, and has seen its proportion of children getting five good GCSEs rise from 55 per cent to 73 per cent in that time.Alite’s trainers are working at full stretch, running eight or nine courses a week, and touching “probably 200 schools a month”. It has also designed a longer training course, to help teachers “embed” the ideas more deeply into schools.But these new ways of teaching and learning are already taking their place at the forefront of school development.