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‘Child-informed’ lessons from the West Riding?
by Colin Richards
1974 was an inauspicious time for those supporting ‘child-centred’ education. It was the year in which the head of William Tyndale Junior School took up his post and it was the year in which the West Riding of Yorkshire disappeared as a county and as a local education authority. William Tyndale Junior School soon became a cause-celebre both for those sympathetic to its radical ethos and to those fundamentally opposed to it. It became notorious as an example of laissezfaire education. Its critics claimed there was neither order nor teaching in the school and by 1975 the school had fallen apart. Its significance was two-fold. Firstly It raised three fundamental questions for public, political and professional debate: what should be taught; how should it be taught and who should see to it that it was taught. Secondly, William Tyndale provided opponents of child-centred education with a convenient, off-quoted caricature of a laissez-faire, knowledge-poor, discovery-oriented, undisciplined, so-called ‘education’. Half-century this caricature still reverberates on twitter, in some ministerial pronouncements and, I suspect, in the sub-text of Ofsted thinking. ‘Child-informed education’: aspects of the West Riding heritage That caricature needs to be questioned since it fails to do justice to the complexities and nuances of an important, misrepresented tradition in English primary education best described perhaps as ‘child-
PrimaryFirst
informed’ education. Which brings me to discussion and illustration of the educational heritage of the West Riding - officially “lost” with the 1974 reorganisation but certainly alive and well a decade later as I witnessed first-hand and at the very least still a ‘trace-element’ in contemporary professional debates. In retrospect it is tempting to view the West Riding with white-rose-coloured glasses but it did have some notable (dare I say ‘outstanding’?) features. For about a quarter of a century it was led by Alec Clegg, a chief education officer whose chief concern was indeed the education of the mind and the spirit of the young people in his charge. In 1972 two years before his retirement at a summer school for West Riding teachers he summarised some of his core ‘child-informed ’ beliefs. These included : •
there is good in every child, however damaged, repellent or ill-favoured he (sic) might be;
•
success on which a teacher can build must somehow be found for each child;
•
all children matter;
•
happy relationships between head, teachers and pupils are all-important;
•
the life of the child can be enriched by the development of his (sic) creative powers;
and importantly •
teachers just as much as pupils need support and thrive on recognition.
