A HONEYPOT village famous for gingerbread and William Wordsworth has become an unlikely new "classroom" for teachers from East London.

The small rural Grasmere CE School has been welcoming student teachers from the urban borough of Newham, to help broaden horizons and compare how education works in two "totally different" settings.

The innovative partnership came about because Grasmere's head teacher, Johanna Goode, did her teacher training with Julian Grenier, head of Sheringham Nursery School, one of the key schools in the East London Teaching Schools Alliance.

While just 80 children are taught at Grasmere, the London nursery has 200 youngsters on roll aged three to five. According to the Newham Recorder newspaper, the borough has more children living in poverty than anywhere else in London.

Grasmere School's business manager, Jonathan Smith, said spending time in the Lakeland village had been "an absolute revelation" to the East London trainees, explaining: "It's the breadth of education we deliver that really amazes them."

Head teacher Mrs Goode said the partnership had confirmed that Grasmere should be "very ambitious" for its children. Although many of the East London pupils were from deprived backgrounds, their highly trained teachers were achieving "spectacular results" in areas such as teaching phonics to children who speak English as a second language.

"It's one of those moments where we open a window on a different world," said Mrs Goode.

"It's possible for all children to achieve and it gives us that extra drive to make sure we are absolutely determined to get excellent phonics results."

She added: "There are lots of things we can do that they can't do, like outdoor education. We've got a very safe environment to explore here and we can do geography, history and science in context, in a way they would struggle to do."

Kate Fallan, East London's director of teaching schools, praised the "family feel" of Grasmere School, and said the professional link-up had become "a true friendship".

"We've found this partnership to be incredibly beneficial as it both widens our students' perspectives and outlook and also confirms the understanding that children are the same all over the country and we have more in common than we realise," she told the Gazette.

"As we come from a very urban area, the way Grasmere uses the incredible environment to develop children's understanding of the world, and their autonomy, really supported our teachers to reflect on how they could get the same results with a different environment."

She added: "The Grasmere children really enjoy meeting us too - all the way from London! - and this supports them in their understanding of diversity and humanity."