The opening of the gigantic new Academy in Nottingham yesterday for 3,500 secondary pupils, with twenty classes in each year-group, appalled me.  Maps had to be issued to every one of the bemused 11-year-olds on their first day at ‘big’ school.  Not long ago ‘big school’ to 10-year-olds was that place a short bus ride away inhabited by youngsters so big that they looked like adults and, with 600-700 pupils seemed frighteningly impersonal.  Is a bigger version of schools whose design failed last year’s children really the solution to today’s problem?

Is bigger really better?  I was reminded of the story about the limitations of conventional thinking in times of profound change, which went like this: During the Second World War the Americans were much impressed by the performance of the two enormous Cunard liners, the Queen Mary, and the Queen Elizabeth, which each transported tens of thousands of troops across the Atlantic so fast that the German U-boats were unable to catch them.  Once the war was over the American government subsidised the building of an even faster passenger ship, the SS United States, which could go faster and, in time of military need, carry even more troops than the old Cunarders.  The SS United States entered service in the mid-1950s, and at a speed of 40 knots she cut the travel time from New York to England to just under 84 hours.  Everyone was very excited; I sailed on her once, and she was a lovely ship.  But after three years this splendid ship started to lose money and within ten years was taken out of service and lay rusting for a quarter of a century.

Why the demise of this grand ship?  Simply because the De Havilland Brothers had seen the value of a new technology and built a commercial jet aircraft, The Comet.  In 1960 the British Overseas Airway Corporation had started flying passengers across the Atlantic in a mere eight hours.  There was nothing wrong with the design of the SS United States but her steam engines had been made obsolete by jet propulsion.

It is the findings of neurobiology, cognitive and social sciences into the nature of human learning, and especially adolescence, that provides the newly understood ‘technology’ which should shape the future nature of secondary education.  Children can learn at a phenomenal rate if they are emotionally secure and intellectually poised to start exploring knowledge to make sense of the world around them.  If the educational policy makers really understood this they would strengthen enormously small primary schools, and increasingly supplement the secondary school with its orderly boxes of classrooms, with endless networks of hands-on apprentice type learning situations across the community.

I wish no ill to those who will labour in Nottingham and possibly elsewhere, to defy the inevitable… but one day such enormous Academies will, like the SS United States, find themselves in the breaker’s yard as an expensive out-of-date technology irrelevant to the needs of tomorrow.

See Part Ten and Actions 1, 4, 5 and 8 of the Briefing Paper

Related posts:

1. Upside Down and Inside Out: Why good schools alone will never be good enough to meet the needs of the 21st Century

Even in Canary Wharf wealthy bankers hang evocative paintings of the countryside without realising how life is being sucked out of small rural communities.  As a family we once cycled through that part of Lincolnshire where a string of spring-line settlements mark the junction of the well-drained limestone soils with the rich peaty loams.  Each of these ancient settlements – Dunston, Sopwick, Ashby de la Launde and Digby – has its church and market square.  These have been home to generations of farmers from at least the time of the Danish Invasion.  I was shocked to find that what had once been proud and cohesive communities had most obviously had the stuffing knocked out of them by the success of agro-business.  Many of the farmyards had been turned into self-storage units; the church yards were (after a thousand years) ill cared for; a village store had been turned into a video store, and a village hall into a furniture store.  A large paper sign read “Save our Schools.”

All that was more than fifteen years ago.  It’s got worse.  According to the National Housing Federation 62 small village schools were closed between 2004 and 2008, with a further 200 estimated to close in the next five years.

It is ironic that while ever more upwardly mobile families pine to live in villages so that their children can attend such small schools (two miles from my office one of the most popular primary schools is in the village of Swainswick with just 62 pupils), these are the very people who, with the ample cash resources from the sale of their London homes, have priced the locals out of the property market.  In far too many instances English villages are mothballed for ten months of the year in preparation for transitory summer visitors.  Others have become semi-cheap dormitories within a car ride of a town.  Village shops, petrol stations, pubs and churches are closing in record numbers and “if schools close, community in many rural areas (areas which provided the space and challenge to yesterday’s Huckleberry Finns) would be wiped out,” reported the Housing Federation.

Who is to blame?  It’s not us, a spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said disclaiming any responsibility (01/09/09) for, “rural schools are central to the village life of communities, which is why we had made it a statutory requirement for Councils to presume that rural schools should stay open.”  Which sounds fine but, given nobody’s overall responsibility for the maintenance of strong communities, it is often that same Department that forces the closure of small schools strictly on financial criteria.

Small is indeed beautiful, but that is only the beginning of why small is important.  Learning to survive in small, highly-interdependent communities, is the best possible education for ultimately living in much larger communities – it is rather like a stack of Russian dolls, each nesting in the one above.  Calling his 1960’s critique of modern life “Small is Beautiful,” Fritz Schumacher gave it its explosive subtitle; “economics as if people mattered.”  That is why vibrant rural communities are essential to our national life – they are where children grow strong.

See Actions 3 and 4 of the Briefing Paper

Related posts:

1. Janet Lawley, Fellow