ONE hundred and fifty years ago the relatives of pupils at Inkberrow First School were starting their first day in the classroom.

The school opened as Inkberrow National School with 140 five to 14-year-olds in 1851.

The Rev George Gray and his parishioners hoped to provide "education for moral and religious instruction of children of the labouring classes of the parish".

The school was built on its current site in Main Street with land offered by the church and the school constructed from local stone.

Twenty years later the schoolhouse was added to accommodate the headmaster and in 1938 a school uniform was introduced.

Today the school is known as Inkberrow First School and has 101 pupils aged from four to nine. The schoolhouse has been sold privately and the uniform has changed.

Sitting in a Year 2/3 class, in one of the school's many extensions, it is hard to imagine how teachers of yesteryear may have conducted lessons.

There would certainly have been none of the technology clearly visible in the classroom, including the whiteboard.

The class was very bright and full of the children's work. Today Roald Dahl's The Twits is the classroom's favourite book, a far cry from the popular children's literature of 1851.

Would the children have had access to pencil crayons, photocopied worksheets and tiny plastic chairs created for their small bodies?

One hundred and fifty years is a long time when it comes to education.

Only in the past few years have there been more major changes to the country's education system.

At Inkberrow First School headteacher June Davis would not normally teach a class of youngsters, but on the day of my visit she was standing in.

"It's been very interesting that quite a lot of these children have had not just parents who attended the school, but grandparents and other relatives who have told them about school in the 1950s and even prior to that," said Mrs Davis, who has been teaching for 30 years.

The school had a celebration fun day in July to mark the end of it's 150th school year.

Past pupils travelled from Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Oxfordshire to meet up and a pair of 80-year-old twins, who still live in the village were there.

Looking at the visitor book you can see names that continue to crop up in the area showing generations of children attending the village school.

One visitor was at the school in 1909, while others left in 1936.

Comparing lessons of today to their era would have shown a vast change.

"It's interesting that parents who experienced schools remember their own school days and seem to think schools have stayed that way," said Mrs Davis.

"They haven't stayed exactly the same as there's a broader emphasis on a wider curriculum.

"When this school would have opened you would have been talking about the three Rs and you wouldn't have been talking about citizenship or, for children this young, science.

"We also do quite a lot of computer work across the years.

"There's been a positive progression through the years in the extension of what they're learning.

"They've needed a wider curriculum to be able to cope with modern day society."

Children now travel to the school from as far afield as The Littletons, on the other side of Evesham, Worcester and Redditch.

"The village was considerably smaller in 1851," said Mrs Davis.

"The children would have been walking over the fields to come to school.

"During harvest time and pea picking the attendance register was quite low because there was a commitment to using the children on the farms.

"There are interesting things of the past.

"There wasn't the depth of learning. These children have an opportunity to learn about all sorts of things. In the past the curriculum didn't allow for specific talents to become developed."

The school is keen to use its history and keep the children informed of what life used to be like.

There is an archive in the school, which is used for history lessons.

As for the future, Mrs Davis says there will be more use of ICT.

"I think we'll have different looking classrooms in the view of interactive whiteboards and more opportunities for individual learning," she said.

"The vision of Estelle Morris is that there will be a big role for ICT."