Exploring children’s heritage

Exploring children’s heritage

“We have a little girl who came to our school from Somalia. She is blind from being beaten about the head with rifle butts by soldiers.” Jill Wood, headteacher at Little London school in Leeds was speaking at the celebration event to mark the end of the five year Going and Coming programme. “This project is about a different way for our children to register their experiences and have them recorded,” she continued. “Not for sympathy and not because we want you to think ‘Oh, poor Little London’, but because there is always hope at the end of every tunnel.”

Jill’s school was one of 80 primaries in Yorkshire that took part in Going and Coming: the multi-media, on-and-off-line project to record and preserve the stories of migrants to Yorkshire. Over its five-year timespan, I was repeatedly amazed at the stories children told about their journeys – whether it was a personal story or an interview carried out with a friend or family member. Even more surprising was that, in so many cases, the stories were unknown to the children (and certainly to their classmates and teachers) before the interviews were carried out.

Without the project’s formal structure, which taught children how to carry out interviews, record and transcribe stories and upload them to the website, these accounts might have been lost forever. A considerable number were from children who were assumed to be English for many generations.

The idea for the project came about because my own mother often told me stories about her journey from Jamaica to England in the 1950s. At Primary Colours, we dramatised this as Olivia’s Journey – a play that toured over 200 primary schools. Audiences were constantly surprised that she left four young children behind when she came to England and would often ask me if it was a true story. So few young people know why migrants came to this country, what they gave up to make the journey and, most importantly in the current economic climate, how much they have contributed to the culture and economy of the UK (my mum worked in the NHS).

The Going and Coming project included a cross curricular teaching pack, which was distributed to 800 schools in Yorkshire. This included lesson plans for teachers based on stories written by children from the 10 pilot schools. Boat People, a play based on Harry’s story, was toured to 70 primaries and children from those schools followed up by interviewing family members and uploading their own stories to the project website.

Ten-year-old Harry interviewed his dad, Tran, who came to England from Vietnam in the 1970s. Tran talks of his family leaving by boat in the middle of the night and spending days on a leaking vessel in the South China Seas. They ended up in a refugee camp in Hong Kong, subsisting on oranges and baked beans.

Eventually, they were given permission to come to England where Tran opened a take-away supplying English people with the Chinese food we have come to love. Harry had no idea that his father was one of the thousands of Vietnamese Boat People who fled the war in Vietnam.

A lasting legacy

There are over 1,000 stories on the Going and Coming website (goingandcoming.co.uk), developed by Primary Colours in partnership with Education Leeds, Leeds Libraries and Heritage, North East Lincs Local Authority, and West Yorkshire Archive Service. The project included training over 150 teachers to use the website and, to date, there have been over 114,000 page views from 50 countries. Almost 9,000 children saw the Boat People play based on Harry’s interview with his dad.

The project website goes offline in December 2013, as funding for the project has now ended, but we are delighted the British Library has agreed to archive the website for posterity, as part of its UK Web Archive. Now the stories collected by so many children will be preserved for future generations (tinyurl.com/laskd2z). At a time when there are so many negative stories in the news about migrants, it is important to remember that Britain is a country built on wave after wave of migration, and that migrants have added a richness and variety to our culture that has made it a better place to live.

Jill Wood ended her speech at the celebration with this thought: “These young people are the future our our city. And I think by giving them a voice early on, and letting them know that voice is listened to and respected, makes them our citizens and councillors of the future.”