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Dartington in Conisbrough by Pat Kitto

Reviewed by Martin Mulkeen

Libertarian Education: £8.95

(There is already another review of this book from a different point of view on the Lib Ed website Dartington in Conisbrough Review by Stephen Jones )

This book is an account of a joint venture, in the nineteen-seventies, between Conisbrough Northcliffe Secondary Modern School, then a relatively radical state school led by the charismatic and forceful Arthur Young and Dartington Hall School, a progressive, fee-paying school led by the radical educational thinker, Royston Lambert. The aim of the project was to exchange experience, ideas, staff and pupils on a short-term basis and to establish an alternative option for students struggling in mainstream education. A central aspect of the scheme was the acquisition of The Terrace, a large detached house in its own grounds in the South Yorkshire mining town of Conisbrough to provide accommodation for students visiting from Dartington and those Conisbrough students who were to join them on courses. Similar residential experience was to be provided at Dartington in South Devon for pupils from Northcliffe and from Mexborough Grammar School whose involvement in the scheme soon faded. Pat Kitto, the author of the account, and her husband, Dick, were appointed as wardens of The Terrace by Dartington in 1972 and continued to live and work there until 1975. During that time, The Terrace became the site of educational work which implicitly questioned many of the assumptions made then and now about how schools ought to be run.

The Kittos oversaw three types of activity at The Terrace. The first of these is described by Pat as ‘Open House’ and consisted of The Terrace being opened to kids of the town as a kind of cultural centre cum youth club. Pat herself describes this strand of their work as sometimes chaotic but also points to moments where individuals and groups eventually gained dramatically from the contact that they had with new ideas or ways of thinking. I remember seeing something of these evenings as a young teacher at Northcliffe and being shocked by the way in which the Kittos opened up what was, after all, their home to what seemed like droves of kids in various states of excitement. Pat admits that the two of them took on the role of policing rather than providing experience such as art, drama, folk singing and story reading sessions.

The other strand of The Terrace’s programme was the provision of courses attended by both Conisbrough and Dartington students, often with groups drawn from both schools. Such courses were also held at Dartington. Pat remembers these courses with more uniform satisfaction than the ‘Open House’ strand, although they were beginning to be less frequently run when she arrived at The Terrace. When I arrived at Northcliffe in 1974, they appeared to be largely a thing of the past. The courses took many forms and often involved members of the community talking about their lives or areas of expertise to groups from both schools. The Kittos and the other staff working at The Terrace were adept at ferreting out engaging and challenging people to work with groups and Pat’s account records real engagement across what might have seemed a massive social and cultural divide.

The last and, to me, most interesting strand of The Terrace’s work was in providing an alternative for those kids trapped by the raising of the school leaving age into staying on at school until they were sixteen years of age in 1974. These were disaffected and, in some cases, delinquent pupils selected from a volunteer group who had found that school offered them little other than boredom and frustration. The first group were all boys and were in the care of the Kittos, a Liverpudlian man of action, Ken Hosie and Neal Fitzgerald, a young drama teacher from Northcliffe seconded for a year to work with the group.

Pat’s account of the first year of the ROSLA scheme in particular makes very interesting reading. The group operated largely under principles laid down by Royston Lambert which included a requirement that the activities undertaken by the group should at least be ‘perceived by them as real life ones’ and that the students ‘should have a real share in the decisions that affect them.’ This solidified into the group being involved in various forms of work such as painting and decorating, renovating furniture and raising vegetables. They attended practical courses locally and at Dartington. They put on plays, climbed rocks and went to art exhibitions. What they also did was talk. In regular sessions, they discussed the work they were doing, their relationship with staff and with other members of the group, what they were to eat and who they were going to invite to join them for meals. Notions of teacher dominance were put aside, real pupil democracy flourished and, according to Pat, the boys made progress physically, mentally and intellectually as a result of the programme they followed. Her account records the sometimes rocky progress that the group made and is meticulous in examining the social and emotional problems that were surmounted. Years later ‘outcomes’, as the sociologists would have it, support Pat’s observations insofar as when the first group was interviewed by Neal Fitzgerald 30 years later, they reported universal valuing of their time at The Terrace and satisfaction with their careers. Two of the group are reported as being millionaires.

What this account suggests is what many teachers have long suspected: schools as we know them are built on precisely the wrong model to educate a substantial minority of our children. All children learn better when they see the point of what they are being asked to do. Some can create this relevance from a bank of cultural conditioning which is absent in others. Real pupil participation in identifying aims and means in the process of learning is a pathway to relevance in education for many even if its implementation nationally on a whole school basis is prohibitively daunting.

The last 30 years in state education have been characterised by a relentless move towards the academic. Our conceptions of what children should learn, how they should behave and even dress at school have retrogressed radically and some of the worst casualties of this return to Victorian rigidity have been the disaffected and non academic minority. What happened at The Terrace all those years ago could have presented an alternative model for these pupils. A special irony for me was that I spent a good part of my career coping with students at Northcliffe School who were being forced through a curriculum invented by a Conservative government and slavishly accepted and developed by a New Labour one which offered a good proportion of our kids very little other than boredom, failure and exclusion.

I remember the ending of The Terrace ‘experiment’ at Northcliffe now with sadness, although I didn’t understand at the time that its consequences would be the hundreds of pointless incidents of disruptive, seemingly mindless oppositional behaviour that I and other staff at Northcliffe would have to deal with as a consequence, let alone the sacrifice of a cartload of human potential for a doctrinal whim. Common sense should have told us that what had gone on at The Terrace was a practical alternative for many kids failed by school.

The book is well written, although the accounts of group discussion seem at times stilted and artificial in their presentation and the moments of enlightenment on the part of some kids are sometimes sentimentally presented. Kitto is, however, precise and honest in her recounting of her own emotions in often incredibly trying circumstances and no teacher worth their salt should be wholly without sentimentality when talking about kids. It’s in the end a profoundly sad book in that it records a past in educational thought and practice seemingly without place in modern mainstream education.

Martin Mulkeen

(Teacher at Northcliffe for 32 years and in that time Head of English, then Assistant Head and finally Advanced Skills Teacher.)

Dartington in Conisbrough can be bought from Lib Ed here

 

 

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