Children are the winners in SBK

Labels, badges, preconceptions, whatever you want to call them. Applied to a bike they can make the difference between sales success and discounts to get anyone interested. Call something a 'sports tourer' and you immediately add the footnote 'dull but worthy.' Likewise calling something a 'supersports' or, even better, 'hypersports' machine will instantly add several percent to it's sales rating, even if it actually about as sporty as John Prescott. Now apply labels to people, especially children, and it becomes an even bigger issue. Someone does well at school and they're a swot. Someone doesn't and they're thick. Someone gets into trouble or seems disinterested and they're a problem child. And so on. Burning to Learn is an organisation working within schools that takes badges, labels and preconceptions and drops them in the bin where they belong. Children from special schools work on projects alongside children from grammar schools, state schools, colleges and so on. They all work together, they all learn from each other and they all develop essential real world skills as a result. The groups work so well together that often it isn't possible to tell who is who, and they all tend towards the better end of the group as well - there's no sign of the dumbing down you might expect or that political correctness might otherwise require.

So there’s this bunch of disaffected children at school. They’re not doing very well – in fact they’re on the verge of failing completely and getting kicked out – and they’ve got the discipline problems often associated with children who feel excluded. But there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with them, though if they carry on then they’ll probably end up in trouble and going downhill from there. Someone has an idea and takes a bunch of them to work on a building site for a day. They learn to lay bricks and are offered the chance to come back tomorrow and do it themselves. If they can work out how many bricks they need, otherwise they’ll be twiddling their thumbs. Presto! A bunch of children who think they can’t do maths are doing maths anyway. And enjoying it.

Alan Dean, who started this all off, lives next to Brands Hatch Circuit. Now there’s a better combination than children and building sites, and that’s children and motorbikes. After all, you get people looking at lap times and so on and they’re doing maths. They can go through race programmes and lo and behold, English gets used. Then you get them doing languages, media skills and anything else that can get crammed in as well. So Alan gave it a go, and the result was Burning to Learn. It was a huge success – so much so that SBK International gave it the nod and gave the Burning to Learn team space in the paddock at Silverstone to set up their media centre. The question is, of course, will the current success make it a regular feature in 2005?

Here’s an example. Silverstone SBK saw the Burning to learn team arrive on Thursday morning with 11 children from special schools to grammar schools. Alan had managed to negotiate a mobile media centre which was loaned by ICW Power for the weekend and parked in the paddock. This was the base from where all operations were carried out. Everyone got an opportunity to meet each other and find out who they were - adult helpers, professionals acting as mentors and advisors, students doing project work and the children - before the activities started properly. First up was a walk around and a chance to get their bearings. Lots of questions, lots of interest. Then an interview had been arranged with James Toseland, but rather than going in and asking random questions, the children were given a chance to discuss what they were going to ask, learn about interview techniques and to structure the interview. On hand were a couple of experienced journalists to give advice and answer questions, but the children did the work and came up with the ideas. James and his colleagues gave up a good 45 minutes to spend time answering questions, being properly interviewed, posing for photographs and doing autographs before the children went on to the Ducati Fila pit to chat with a technician and see how the rest of the team works.

Friday morning saw a meeting with Foggy Petronas. Originally this was going to be an interview with Neil, the PR manager, but Foggy himself turned up and spent 15 minutes or so chatting and being interviewed. By this time another 20 children or so had arrived for the day, this time from a local school, and there was an opportunity for all the children to work together. Social skills are very important and often neglected, and this type of exercise develops them. More visits, interviews and photo opportunities followed. Fujifilm had loaned half a dozen digital cameras for the event so the children got the opportunity to take as many pictures as they wanted, uploading them to PCs in the media centre and manipulating them as necessary. That’ll be IT and artistic skills being worked on, then.

Race weekend itself saw more photos, more visits and more excitement. One of the children, who has an aptitude for languages, has been learning Italian for a few months. Who better, then, to interview Frankie Chili? In Italian. Again, a top rider giving up a good half an hour of his time to help children.

During the weekend many of the events were filmed, with the children themselves acting as directors and editing the results on an Apple Powerbook laptop. Among visitors who wandered over to see the part-finished result were James Toseland, Leon Haslam and James Haydon. More IT skills plus media, creative and social skills all being developed.

Burning to Learn is not a bleeding-heart organisation that blames society for misbehaving children. Nor does it molly-coddle and cosset the children, or refuse to allow them to take responsibility for their actions. Far from it – the regime is extremely disciplined and the children take full responsibility for their actions, both good and bad. There is physical work, including army style physical exercises known as the brain gym, and if a child excludes themselves from the activities then there are no alternatives offered. They sit and do nothing. Briefly, before asking if they can come and join in again. Working in conjunction with schools, including special needs, Burning to Learn gives children whose next stop would probably otherwise be some sort of detention centre an opportunity to make something useful of themselves, to learn to communicate properly and to regain some self respect. I saw one boy, who came up on Thursday unable to relate sensibly to people outside his own peer group, mature overnight into someone who could have the guts to go find Carl Fogarty and ask him for an autograph and come up with some brilliant interview questions for other riders. Excursions like Silverstone are given as rewards to children for working hard and staying with the programme. But they still learn and grow at the same time. Working with children from different environments gives them a chance to develop the social skills mentioned before while meeting professionals in all walks of life shows that while yes, some people have achieved their goals with the benefit of a great education, others have made it in spite of being labelled failures at school. Not giving up, recognising your own self worth and seeing that you can make the best out of the skills you do have is the key lesson that everyone, whether supposedly a special needs child or a grammar school student or, indeed, an adult professional working with them takes away from Burning to Learn.

Alan asks a lot from people, but he tries to give it back, too. The week after the Silverstone meeting it was Frankie Chili's birthday. So Alan sent the children out with an autograph book to get a birthday message for him from as many people in the paddock as they could before presenting it to him on Sunday afternoon. It was great to see just how popular Frankie is with his rivals as well as fans, and to see his face when the book was presented to him.

At the moment, Burning to Learn, with children in distinctive (and usually heavily autographed) polo shirts, are becoming known and recognised in the paddock and pits around the country. Next stop is to get them on the grid...

You can find out more about Burning to Learn from their website or by e-mailing Alan Dean. There are real opportunities for forward thinking companies to benefit from a relationship with them, especially as their profile increases, and it's worth remembering that they receive no Government funding whatsoever.