AVAST, me hearties – there be stories off the port bow!

As part of a three-year project to fire the imagination, the team from Oxford's Story Museum have built an entire pirate ship at this Banbury secondary school.

Artist Liz Cooke, who also made the Story Museum's giant bed exhibit, designed and installed the interactive exhibition in the library at Banbury Academy over the past few months.

It is designed to inspire the students to read, write and imagine.

On Friday morning, letting their imaginations set sail again, they decorated the creative craft for Christmas.

Story Museum learning and participation manager Isy Mead said: “It’s really quite impressive. It’s not like a museum piece where you’re not allowed to touch it – you can move the steering wheel and put stuff inside the lockers.

"The kids have been doing all sorts of work with it – going to sea as pirates and writing messages in bottles and more metaphorically sailing away on a sea of stories. It’s not just about results, it’s about finding creative ways of learning – it’s typical Story Museum, really.”

The Story Museum's three-year START partnership with Banbury Academy has been funded by national educational charity Children And The Arts.