City farms for kids

Sometimes, beyond anything else, the most important thing we can do as teachers is to make children feel valued, says Michael Morpurgo...

Thinking back, it came upon me quite suddenly, and the more I thought about it, the more I felt it to be true. Teaching a Year 6 class in a rural primary school in Kent, I felt that at best only half of the children were benefiting from their education, were on the road to fulfilling their potential. I knew as their teacher that I was, with their parents, enabling them to get the best out of their time at school. But the other half were failing. I was failing them and their parents were failing them too. These were the children who came from homes where there were no books, where people didn’t talk much, where television and materialism ruled. The few hours we had with them at school were, I was sure, having very little positive effect. These children were on a road to nowhere, and most of them were beginning to know it already, beginning to resent school, beginning to give up.

With Clare, my wife, who was also a teacher, we began to try to work out how this situation might be changed. We thought we knew a way forward but to be sure, we did our research. Wherever we asked in university departments of education, the response seemed to support the notion we were working on. What all children needed most was to feel needed, and this had to happen young. They had to feel that their contribution was important, that they mattered. Self-worth was the key. If we could get children to feel good about themselves and that their contribution was valued, then maybe, maybe, things might change.

So rather idealistically, naively, we moved from Kent to Devon. With money left to Clare by her father, Allen Lane, who began Penguin Books, we bought a farm, a large Victorian manor house, and set up a charity. A year or so later the first children came from Chivenor Primary School in Birmingham, led by a teacher called Joy Palmer. With her and her team, with the neighbouring farmers, the Ward family, we pioneered a programme of work designed to extend children in every way possible out on the farm, physically, mentally, emotionally, intellectually. They would become the farmers, work alongside their teachers and the Ward family, and me, and Clare, so that they could be involved in every aspect of the farm, within the bounds of safety. A class of Year 5 and 6, they had come for a week of their school term and, like the 75,000 children who have come after them, they did a full working week, whatever the season and the weather – milking, feeding sheep, moving them, lambing them, feeding pigs, hens, geese, ducks, turkeys, mucking the animals out, bedding them down, caring for them. They dug potatoes, planted trees, picked blackberries and apples, made apple juice. They fetched hay and straw, mended lanes, made bonfires of hedge-trimmings, dug thistles, cleared the river banks of rubbish, picked stones from the fields to fill the gateways.

It is hard work, real work, and children know their work is essential and important, that it matters to the animals, to the farm, that it simply matters. They matter.

With that new confidence, attitudes and work habits change, relationships with friends and teachers can be cemented. Children gain an awareness of their place in the world, of the ecology of the countryside, of where their food comes from, of the need to look after the environment because they know it belongs to them now; it is theirs to care for. Who knows the effect on them of all this long term?

Ted Hughes once said many of these children would treasure their time on the farm for the rest of their lives, that as grandparents they will remember and pass on the stories of their time in the countryside, down on the farm. Passing it on is what education can and must do; it’s all that education can do.