Out of the Woods But Not Over the Hill

by Gervase Phinn

  Children can be a delight but they can also be corrosively mean and spiteful, and those of us who become the object of the bully’s unwelcome attention remember for a lifetime those periods when it was our turn to be picked on.

  When I was a school inspector I would ask children what they thought made a really good school. The answer came back again and again: ‘No bullying.’

  Parked Around the Back

  Some years ago, I visited Ampleforth College. I had been invited by the then headmaster to attend a school drama production and the VIP reception beforehand. I duly arrived in good time and parked my car (an old black Volvo estate) in front of the main building.

  Two young students, dressed in smart sports jackets and flannels, approached me.

  ‘Would you mind parking around the back, sir?’ said one, as I emerged from the car. ‘This area is reserved for the VIPs.’ I didn’t enlighten them that I was there for the reception and had been told to park in this spot, but drove the car to where I was directed.

  ‘You are rather early, sir,’ said one of the boys. ‘Would you like to look around the college?’

  ‘That would be splendid,’ I replied.

  The two boys took me on a tour around the college, one of them explaining that on entering the library we should keep our voices down. There followed a short history of the college and abbey, details of the old boys and the sporting successes, and was told that much of the furniture and fittings were by the famous woodcarver, ‘Mouseman’ Thompson.

  ‘And how are you finding the Volvo?’ asked the other boy.

  I explained that, with four young children, it was ideal. It was roomy and comfortable, a little heavy on petrol but very safe and reliable. It was getting on a bit, but had a good few miles left on it yet.

  The boy, clearly something of an expert on cars, then proceeded to suggest various other vehicles in which I might be interested should I be changing the car.

  Eventually, I admitted that I was expected at the headmaster’s reception. The two boys looked horrified and apologised for asking me to park in the general car park.

  ‘Not to worry,’ I said. ‘We have had a most interesting conversation. You were excellent guides.’

  Schools can have all the glossy brochures they like, but the best advertisements are the students, they way they speak and behave. These two young men gave a splendid impression to a visitor: confident, courteous and good-humoured.

  Some five years later, I took part in a BBC radio programme and was asked for a favourite piece of music to end. The track I chose, Panis Angelicus, was one featured on the superb Ampleforth College CD, Spiritus, performed by two young brothers. Listening to the piece sung in such beautiful clear voices made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. I arranged to visit Ampleforth again, in the hope that I could arrange for two of the younger boys to perform the piece on the radio programme.

  I parked my car (a smart new Toyota Avensis) in front of the main building, and climbed out. Two senior students in smart grey suits were walking past. One of them smiled.

  ‘I see you’ve changed the Volvo, sir,’ he said, smiling.

  Paying a Visit

  When I first visited the comprehensive school which my sons attended, the head teacher, Tony Storey, who had the distinction of being the country’s oldest serving secondary head teacher, asked me if there was anything I wished to ask, or anywhere I would like to visit. ‘The boys’ toilets,’ I told him.

  ‘You are either a school inspector or a plumber,’ he replied, smiling. I told him I was the latter.

  The toilets were clean, well kept and free of graffiti and litter. There were locks on the cubicles, soap, paper towels and adequate toilet paper. I knew then that this was no ‘bog-standard comprehensive’, to use that ill-judged description, and was proved to be right. It turned out to be a first-rate school and my sons and daughter all did very well.

  That same week, I visited a primary school in Carlton-in-Snaith and found the amenities of the same high standard. The building I entered was a bright, cheerful and welcoming one. Children’s work of a high quality enhanced a busy, workmanlike environment. The head teacher, Peter Holgate, who had spent thirty or more years in the profession, gestured to a veritable tower of folders and files in the corner of his room.

  ‘I get guidelines, recommendations, policy documents, circulars, questionnaires, reports, handbooks, strategies and I don’t know what else, every week. I do wish people would not waste their time and money producing what has been said so many times before, and allow teachers to provide the best environment for learning and to get on with their teaching.’

  He was right, of course; so much advice sent to schools has been given before. The Handbook of Suggestions for Teachers, produced by the Board of Education in 1936, is a far more sensible, intelligible and interesting publication than many of the recently produced directives which schools receive. For example, on the school itself is the paragraph:

  The school cannot perform its functions adequately unless the premises themselves are an example of what we naturally associate with a civilised life. The building should be dignified and pleasing as well as conducive to health. The internal decorations should be bright and attractive with specimens of good craft work and suitably chosen pictures placed to best advantage. The school, moreover, should give an impression of order and cleanliness, reflected for instance, in the care of books and apparatus, in the proper storing of clothes in well-kept cloakrooms, and in the tidy appearance of playgrounds and offices. The school should, in short, be a source of comfort and inspiration to the children while they are young, as a place where, for an important part of their day, they can pursue their studies in a friendly, healthy and civilising atmosphere.

  I was thinking of this paragraph when I visited a secondary school the following week. It was quite a contrast: a run-down, shabby-looking Colditz of a place, enclosed within high redbrick walls. The corridors were bare, save for a few dog-eared posters on the walls, and the rain had seeped through the roof, leaving dark brown stains on the ceilings. In the boys’ toilets, which were smelly and dark, and bereft of soap and toilet paper, there was a long list of pupils’ names stretching down the back of one cubicle door. The heading read: ‘Sign here if you think this place is a dump.’ I was very tempted to add my name.

  Off By Heart

  Poetry took centre stage in primary schools across the country with the launch of Off By Heart, an exciting BBC poetry competition to find the pupil who could best recite a well-known poem from memory. The winner performed his chosen poem at Oxford last year, and I was delighted to be asked to be the lead judge in the northern finals. It is good to celebrate children’s talents and achievements, particularly when all we seem to read about are difficult and disaffected youngsters. I was also pleased to be part of this initiative because I am a big believer that children should know by heart some of the well-known traditional verse.

  I can still recite some of the poems I learnt as a child: the nursery rhymes and riddles, tongue twisters and nonsense verse. I still recall with great pleasure the occasions when, as a small child, I stood with my father at the kitchen sink as we washed and dried the dishes (which we called the ‘pots’), and he would launch into a funny poem or a monologue; I thought he made them up.

  I cannot say I was very keen when, at school, we were compelled to learn poems by heart. Now I am glad I did learn pieces of verse. As I travel down the motorway at dusk and see the moon high in the sky, I find myself reciting part of a remembered verse: ‘the moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas’. As I stroll along a pebbly shore, the words of a poem I learnt at school, where ‘the flung spray and the blown spume, and the seagulls crying’, come to mind. Late at night, when I look up at the dark and empty sky I recall the words of Walter de la Mare’s beautiful poem: ‘Slowly, silently, now the moon, walks the night in her silver shoon’.

  Children, I have found, do enjoy learning poems if it is not made too
much of a chore. They love showing off their talents and performing the poems, particularly before their proud parents at school concerts. The young contestants who took part in Off By Heart were a delight to hear, and performed with wonderful expression, gesture, perfect timing and great clarity and confidence. It was such a pleasure to hear the words of the great poets – Rudyard Kipling, William Wordsworth, Edward Lear, Hillaire Belloc, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Walter de la Mare, A A Milne, T S Elliot, W B Yeats and many more – brought to life by young voices.

  An inspector colleague of mine once visited a large primary school in the middle of a dreadfully depressing inner-city area. He found a nervous little boy in the corner of the classroom. When he asked if he could examine his book, the child looked at him with such large, sad eyes and said very quietly: ‘No.’ My colleague tried to coax him but the boy was adamant, saying that his work was not worth looking at. He couldn’t spell, his writing was untidy and he never got good marks for his work. Eventually, he was persuaded to show his writing. The work was indeed of poor quality.

  Then, at the very back of the book, the school inspector came upon a piece of writing in small crabbed print. The pupil was asked if he had written it. He nodded. He was asked if he had received any help with it. He shook his head. ‘This is a small masterpiece,’ the inspector told him, and he read it aloud with great feeling:

  Yesterday yesterday yesterday

  Sorrow sorrow sorrow

  Today today today

  Hope hope hope

  Tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow

  Love love love

  ‘What a wonderful little poem,’ the inspector remarked.

  The boy thought for a while, stared up at the visitor with those large, sad eyes and announced: ‘They’re mi spelling corrections, sir.’

  Playtime

  I am patron, along with Professor Fletcher Ranney DuBois, of Queen Street School, in Barton-in-Humber. I recently shared a platform with this eminent educationalist, speaking to the friends and volunteer supporters who have tirelessly restored this remarkable and unique Victorian school. The building had remained derelict for almost thirty years and was destined to be demolished to make way for a car park. Thankfully, the Queen Street Preservation Trust was established and, with help from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Yorkshire Forward, English Heritage and various other bodies, it has been faithfully recreated as a unique infant schoolroom, with tiered seating, gas lighting, an open fire, blackboard, slates, old desks, Victorian privy, playground and garden. It is now open to the public and is a small gem.

  A principal aim of those wishing to preserve Queen Street and restore it was to revive the reputation of the nineteenth-century pioneering educationalist, Samuel Wilderspin, whose work provided the model for infant schools in Europe and America, and who is credited with the invention of the playground. Wilderspin, at a time when discipline in schools was strict and sometimes brutal, believed passionately that a child should be encouraged to learn through experience and in the development of feelings as well as intellect. Children, he believed, were born inherently good and deserved the very best models of behaviour from teachers and parents. Schools should be, for the most vulnerable and impoverished children, what the home is for the most fortunate: a place where there is work but where there is also laughter; a place where there is law but also where there is grace; a place where there is justice but where there is also love. He also believed in the educational value of play.

  I was saddened to read that a new school has been built with every conceivable electronic resource and energy-saving device, but without a playground, for, as the head teacher remarked, in the twenty-first century, better use could be made of the space and anyway, playgrounds are not really necessary in ‘a learning centre’. Then there is the head teacher of the infant school who has done away with the play area in the infant classroom to concentrate on more formal teaching approaches. It is regrettable that the ‘home corner’, where children can dress up, get into role, practise talking, reading, writing and acting out parts, is regarded by some as merely decorating the margins of the serious business of study.

  Play, as Wilderspin was at great pains to stress, is of great importance for the developing child. He knew, as good teachers do today, nearly 150 years after his death, that play develops the imagination, promotes creativity, thinking, fruitful talk, co-operation and much, much more.

  In one infant school, I met a stocky six-year-old boy dressed in a large blue apron, standing outside his little café in the home corner. I seated myself at the small melamine table and looked at a blank piece of paper, at the top of which was written, in bold lettering: menu. The little boy sidled up, and stared at me intently. I looked up.

  ‘What’s it to be?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, taking on the role of a customer, ‘I think I’ll just have something to drink.’

  The boy disappeared, and returned a moment later with a small, empty, plastic beaker, which he placed before me. Then he watched intently as I drank the imaginary liquid, licked my lips and exclaimed: ‘That was the nicest cup of tea I have had in a long while.’

  ‘It’s an ’arf o’ bitter,’ he told me bluntly, and walked off.

  It would have brought a smile, I am sure, to Samuel Wilderspin.

  With Onions

  I was teaching a class of eleven-year-olds in a Dales primary school. I was using a selection of stuffed animals – badger, mole, rabbit, stoat and fox cub – as stimuli and hoped that, by the end of the morning, the children would have produced some short, interesting descriptive poems. I spent a good ten minutes talking about the creatures but it soon became clear that these children, mostly from farming backgrounds, knew a whole lot more about them than me.

  The previous week I had taught the same lesson in a school in Harrogate, and the children had produced rather trite and sentimental pieces of verse about little, soft-furred moles, adorable little dormice, gambolling rabbits or playful squirrels. The poems the children wrote in the Dales primary school that morning were very different – blunt, realistic descriptions of the animals that they knew so much about. They clearly did not need stuffed animals to prompt them. There were images of ‘fierce, sharp-toothed badgers’, ‘crows which picked at the dead animals on the road’, ‘fat, black rats that hid in the hay’ and ‘red foxes creeping behind the hen coop’. Thomas’s effort was quite clearly the best:

  On a frosty morning, my granddad

  Takes his Jill to catch rabbits.

  She has a little blue collar and a silver bell,

  Tiny red eyes and creamy fur,

  And she trembles in his hands.

  ‘Thomas lives on the farm at the top of the dale,’ explained his teacher, as we headed in the direction of the school hall for lunch. ‘Like most farming children, he’s been brought up to be unsentimental about animals. They are on the farm for a purpose, not as pets, and any creature which affects their livelihood is regarded as a pest. You should hear what he’s got to say about foxes.’ She paused for a moment, before adding:

  ‘Thomas has a great deal to say for himself, hasn’t he?’

  At lunch, I sat between Thomas and an angelic-looking little girl. The boy surveyed me. ‘Meat and tatey pie for lunch,’ he said, rubbing his hands. ‘My favourite.’ He stared at me for a moment. ‘I reckon you won’t be ’aving any.’

  ‘Why is that?’ I asked, intrigued.

  ‘You’re probably one of those vegetarians. Me granddad doesn’t like vegetarians. He says they take the meat out of his mouth. “There’s nothing better than a good bit o’ beef on your plate or a nice bit o’ pork on your fork.” That’s what my granddad says. He doesn’t like vegetarians, my granddad.’

  Before I could inform Thomas that I was not, in fact, a vegetarian, the little angel sitting next to me whispered shyly, ‘I like rabbits.’

  ‘So do I,’ I replied.

  ‘My daddy likes rabbits too.’

  ‘Does he?’

  ‘An
d my mummy likes rabbits.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  She took a mouthful of meat and potato pie before adding quietly, ‘They taste really good with onions.’

  Sent to the Head Teacher

  You again, Farringdon!

  Yes, sir.

  Can’t you stay out of trouble?

  I try, sir.

  Well, you don’t try very hard, do you?

  I suppose not, sir.

  Three times this week you have been sent to my room.

  That’s right, sir.

  For getting into trouble.

  Yes, sir.

  You’re a nuisance, Farringdon.

  Yes, sir.

  A teachers’ nightmare!

  Yes, sir.

  A difficult, disruptive, disobedient boy.

  Yes, sir.

  A naughty, wayward, badly behaved young man.

  Yes, sir.

  A trouble, a torment, the bane of my life!

  If you say so, sir.

  I do, Farringdon! I do!

  Yes, sir.

  And when I leave next week, Farringdon.

  Yes, sir?

  I shall not be sorry if I never ever see you again!

  I see, sir.

  Well, what is it this time?

  I’ve brought you a leaving card, sir – to wish you good luck in your new job.

  ‘The Wonder Years’

  The Magic of Childhood

  To Be a Child

  Young children are a delight. The small child knows nothing of skin colour, rank, status, religion, money and the many other things that are at the root of envy and discord. For the little one, everything in the world is fresh, colourful and exciting. Smile at a small child and invariably the smile is returned.

  After forty years in education, as a teacher and school inspector, I have met countless numbers of children and been genuinely entertained, amused and, on occasions, greatly moved by them.