The David Gribble Archive : Talks

Four topics

Italy, 2002. Treviso, Trieste, Ferrara, Padua and Milan
Page 4

Sands School

I will give examples of different ways these ideals manifest themselves in the last part of this talk. First, however, I shall tell you about one particular school. It is the one which I helped to found, and the one in which I taught for the last four years of my teaching career before I retired at the age of 60.

We founded Sands School when Dartington Hall School was closed, in 1987.

What a lot of questions that simple sentence implies. Firstly, what was Dartington Hall School? It was a school I had taught in for almost thirty years, and where all my four children had been educated. When it was at is height it had three hundred pupils, aged between three and eighteen. It was a boarding and day school where parents had to pay substantial fees. In Britain there is no way round this unfortunate situation – if you want to be different you cannot work within the state system. Some state schools have managed to be different for a few years, but before long they have always been closed or forced to change their ways. Dartington, as an independent school, was able to be different. There was informal friendliness between adults and children, there were voluntary lessons from the age of thirteen, no system of punishment, no uniform. The degree of shared power fluctuated at different times in the school's sixty years of history but there was always a wide range of freedom.

Dartington Hall School was closed down by its own Board of Trustees. They were legally responsible for it and in fact the owners of its premises, but they had little contact with it. They closed it down against the wishes of the children, their parents and the staff. They had lost sight of the virtues of the system and saw only the problems. They failed to see that these problems, of which drug use was the one that shocked them the most deeply, were not specific to the school but were common to adolescents all over the country. They thought that their model school should have no problems. They did not understand that what was wonderful about the school was not an impossible absence of problems, but a particular way of dealing with them.

When the school was closed there were fourteen children left who wanted to continue with the same kind of education, and three staff, of whom I was one, who wanted to continue working with them. We were determined that our new school should not be set up so that it could be closed down by people who did not understand it. The main duty of the necessary legal body of Governors at Sands is to ensure that the school is run in accordance with the wishes of the students and staff, as expressed in the school meeting.
The school meeting, which takes place once a week, or more often if there is a crisis of some kind, is open to all the children and all the staff. When decisions are voted on everyone present has one vote. There is no head teacher, but one of the teachers is chosen as administrator. The administrator does everything a head teacher would do except take any decisions. Many people find this sentence difficult to take accept, so I shall repeat it. The administrator does everything a head teacher would do except take any decisions. One of the main duties is to make sure that all necessary decisions are in fact taken, and that they are then acted upon.

When Sands started the children decided that they wanted a formal timetable that was to be compulsory for everybody. This was not what the staff wanted, but the children wanted a secure framework. Lessons are no longer compulsory, and this is how a recent student, Immalee Gould, described the situation in an article in the English magazine Lib Ed:-

I am probably one of the students who attend their lessons most regularly, but I do not go to all of them. Sometimes it is just more important to go up to the moors, or to watch a video, or sort out a conflict between other people in school. I am not going to spend the rest of my life in maths lessons, but I am going to spend time with people doing real things. At Sands we realise that lessons are not the most important thing in life.