Wealden Times | WT176 | October 2016 | Kitchen & Bathroom supplement inside

Lateral
thinking
WT’s education columnist Susan Elkin looks at the different options available in both the state and private sectors to
parents seeking alternative forms of education for their children
Children are not socks. One-size-fits-all doesn’t
work in education. Every child is different, has his
or her own way of learning and comes complete
with unique needs. That’s why Bedales in Hampshire
and Frensham Heights in Surrey emphasise the arts
and personal development and why Slindon College in
Sussex works with boys “who don’t thrive in a mainstream
environment” and provides high levels of learning support.
A mainstream school isn’t always the answer for every
child. They tend to be large and children have to fit into
the system rather than the system adapting to the child.
Even independent schools can be pretty samey with the
pretty girl playing the violin on page 5 of the prospectus,
the wholesome boy in his cricket whites on page 7 and
everyone in science goggles looking very alert on page 9.
So what about the alternatives? Schools which swim
against the tide and try to offer something quite different,
usually with a strong focus on individuality, may seem
like a gamble but they can work well for some children.
The alternatives come in two main forms. First there are
independent schools trying to break away from the norm
and for these, obviously, fees are charged unless the child
wins a scholarship or is assigned some sort of bursary.
Then there is the new breed of ‘free school’. Such schools
are part of the state education system and therefore free at the
point of use as well as being free from local authority control
and many of the regulations which govern their maintained
sector counterparts. That allows scope for a different way of
working if that’s what the people concerned want. There are
now 300 free schools across England, including for example,
eight in Kent and Medway and more in Sussex and Surrey.
Let’s look at the independent options first. The
most famous example, and certainly the most
extreme, is AS Neill’s Summerhill in Suffolk which
was founded by the eponymous Neill in 1921 and is
now run by his daughter Zoe Neill Readhead.
It hasn’t always been plain sailing. The school was
severely criticised by Ofsted in the late 1990s and came
close to closure in 2000. And a 1993 Channel 4 TV
documentary, which showed students killing and cooking
a wild rabbit, did it no favours in the public eye.
The idea has always been to run a school on democratic
lines. In practice that means daily councils at which
pupils make management decisions, optional lessons
and a strong focus on learning outside the classroom.
Summerhill’s published examination results suggest
that most students attend most lessons most of the
time and that they are well taught. In 2015, for
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