Bassingbourn Book Cafe

            Impington Village College

Henry Morris - Educator

Eighty five years ago a young man called Henry Morris was appointed to the post of Secretary for Education in this county. Cambridgeshire, at the time, was a small, very poor, rural authority. Its village schools were “all-age”: children left at 14 years of age – boys onto the land, girls into service. What went on inside those buildings “bad and seldom beautiful” was generally hidden from public view. Discipline was summarily delivered, the cane ruled supreme.

Miserable wages

Farmworkers were low paid and plentiful: their houses drab, unsanitary, and occupied by large families. For them “disposable income” was a phrase waiting to be born: most people were lucky or good managers if they could eke out the miserable wage to cover the necessities of life. And yet villages like Bassingbourn had pubs, shops and tradesmen: but Cambridge villages, generally, had seen a steady fall in population and a leaching away of its young people – its life blood.

The Architect: the silent educator?

It must have seemed surprising when Morris proposed two years later, before the depth of the Depression, a series of new public constructions that would complement the finest buildings present in the villages – the parish churches. He outlined his ambitious plans in his Memorandum of 1924* and worked very hard to revitalize the village by the establishment of Village Colleges.

Village Community

We are some distance from those times but the problems of rural life, though different, are acute, real and pressing. For people who live in Bassingbourn is there a “sense of village”, of “village life”, of “belonging”, of “community”? For many I think there is. But equally there are others who don’t feel part of that shared village life. Are the institutions which were intended to be at the heart of our community life – particularly the schools – as close as they previously were to the pulse of local life?  They may try to be but....their main task seems to be ever more fixed to national curricular demands and outside dictates, thus their good work, and finite energy – once shared locally, is ever more diluted, and, what is left is understandably directed towards their central government paymaster’s directives. They are then left, one suspects, mired beneath a growing slough of paperwork and external orders. The real danger is that they may be already in the process of being, bit by bit, cut-off from the very community they were intended to serve.

“The village college would change the whole face of the problem of rural education,” said Morris. Maybe it did at that time.

But are we any nearer, spiritually and temporally, to his hope that:

“There would be no 'leaving school'! - the child would enter at three and leave the college only in extreme old age. It would have the virtue of being local so that it would enhance the quality of actual life as it is lived from day to day - the supreme object of education...”?

The continued hope is that the principle may be preserved but it is, probably, too much to expect that it can be delivered as it was intended. Perhaps a new concordat is needed – but are we likely to find a visionary with the eye of a Morris?