Luckwell Primary School fosters a creative and collaborative approach to learning. It is a learning environment in which pupils stand for election on the School Council, a group comprising a boy and a girl from each year group (aged 7-11), who meet weekly to discuss important issues such as whether football should be allowed in the playground or whether orange juice should be permitted at lunchtime. The members of the Council then feed back the results of their discussions to the whole school during assembly the next morning.

It is an approach which engenders pupil empowerment whilst also nurturing keen awareness of citizenship. "Now kids live in a really turbulent society," headteacher Keith Johnson said when Futurelab interviewed him. "Kids will have to live with constant change. and changes, possibly several times, within their working lives." For these reasons, the school is engaged in collaborative work with schools from other countries and other cultures, to enhance pupils' understanding of the diverse cultural and personal values and beliefs they may meet throughout their education and beyond.

"In ten years' time," Johnson hopes, "without the current barriers, we'll be educating on the basis of human potential, and educating for the future instead of the past." He is particularly concerned with the ways in which children each learn differently and exhibit different sets of skills.

While, he suggests, David Beckham may be an idol to many children, he is not regarded as academically very able. But Beckham should be held up as a role model, because he exhibits some extraordinary talents. Similarly, children often show potential in subjects for which they are not adequately supported, and are made to feel as though they are not at all gifted if they cannot perform as strongly in maths or English, for instance.

New technology, he suggested, may well hold the key to unlocking some of this potential, principally insofar as it allows children to communicate with people who "are not in the room". "Children should be able to use technology to speak to children from other cultures to learn about - and how to value - cultural differences and similarities."

By way of example he cited a project in which pupils from the school exchanged e-mails with American children during the Gulf War. What emerged was a mutual exchange of fears, a transmission of feelings synonymous across the Atlantic divide. "E-mail made this possible, but it would have been much more effective through video conferencing or just talking to each other," Johnson said. Newer technology has already allowed schools to advance to this stage.

Technology alone, however, he argued, can be as stultifying as rote learning if not used correctly. Conventionally, children are taught how to use ICT in the classroom - but more crucially technology should provide a gateway to experiences that children would not otherwise have access to. "Kids will still bang drums, still dance, and still get muddy - and still play team games," Johnson said - and he believes these activities must continue. The collaborative aspect of team game-play after all is what underpins the potential of interactive new technology for use in education.

Asked how interactive media might be used in the Luckwell classroom, Johnson talked about the school's planned use of the game Age of Empires - a strategy game allowing players to build and control small settlements. Having observed it in use elsewhere, what he found most interesting were the ways in which children would react to problems within the game, and collaborate through an exchange of viewpoints in coming to creative solutions. Thus, while Johnson believes some games engender only a kind of pseudo-creativity, in that set rules inhibit true creativity, other applications and products can promote successful collaborative learning and development.

A case in point is the use of digital video, "which you can give to a 6 year-old and they can actually put ideas across". When Luckwell's playground apparatus was closed due to health and safety restrictions, pupils created short DV films explaining why they needed new playing equipment. The manipulation of still digital photography using Paintshop Pro has also provided children with opportunities. "Not every pupil is capable of drawing well, but most children are capable of taking a reasonable photo and turning that into a form of art." Similarly, technology allows children to produce written work to a professional standard that they simply could not match with a biro or a pencil.

The promise of technology is mainly, however, the ways in which it can marry together both verbal and visual pedagogical processes. Luckwell is involved in a programme with a school in Mozambique, with whom they exchange photos to explore each other's lives, "which has just blown apart every preconception we ever had about what it's like to live [there]". Children were given not only a verbal explanation of life in Mozambique, but pictorial reference too. If, Johnson said, such material could be accessed through technology as required, paired with communication link-up tools, then this would truly open the way for visual and verbal interactivity and communication for the children of Luckwell School.

Luckwell School is promoting creativity and collaboration as a means towards better learning. Using technology only as and when it proves useful ensures that children still experience the magical imaginary world that books encourage, as well as the muck and noise of normal game-play and team work. The most important lesson a creative approach can teach a child, Johnson argued, is that if a project fails, it is not that the child is rubbish, but that there are other, better ways of approaching problems. Creative collaborative work allows children to see these other ways - and these are lessons that everyone needs in a turbulent society.