Newly appointed principal of West Lakes Academy, Barrie Cooper has an opportunity that most Head Teachers would envy: to have a decisive influence on the building of the school and ensure that its spaces express the learning concepts that he and his staff wish to impart to the children. Instead of being hide bound by fixed sized classrooms, in which one teacher faces twenty-five children, the building will have larger, more flexible spaces, in which children can move around comparing work with one another, or break off to work in groups after watching presentations on screen or visiting websites.
The school's structure will express the true business of education, facilitating its focus on skills and concepts rather than merely the acquisition of subject content. Its strategy, based on Social, Emotional, Cognitive Strategic Thinking, will be to encourage children to move forward rather than revisiting failure or humiliation. He gave an example of students working on mathematical concepts no longer having to face the embarrassment of raising a hand in class to ask for the teacher's support, but working from note books with different coloured pages. Showing a green page gives the teacher the message that the student is proceeding confidently; a red page indicates the need for some explanation. Teachers will be expected to understand the emotional needs of the whole child rather than see him or her as a little pitcher to be filled with facts.
Learning will be community based and whole families will be encouraged to become engaged in projects. They might for example work with Egremont Rugby Union Club not only on training schemes but on the production programmes on computers. Parents and children will acquire reading and IT skills confidently together. Barrie is determined that parents with experience of failure in schools must not feel excluded from their children's learning.

Barrie quickly reassured us that an academy specialising in Science, Technology and Business Enterprise would not be narrow in its focus on the skills imparted. To apply for specialist status a school would need to show how its specialism would help to develop the whole personality of its pupils and lead to accomplishment in other fields of study, especially in music, drama and fine arts. He knows from the experience of his second son, Gareth, now a professional actor, how artistic achievement can fire confidence in the possibilities of personal success.

He also made very clear that though the Academy would welcome pupils from more distant towns and villages its intake would remain strictly comprehensive and would never charge fees. Children from primary schools in Egremont, Cleator Moor and other local towns and villages, for example, would always have the absolute right to a place.