What I remember most vividly from school are not the lessons in the classroom — reading Dickens, studying trigonometry, internalising French grammar. What I remember from Thomas Tallis in Kidbrooke are the school trips, after school clubs, preschool activities in the cafeteria where I chatted amiably with all the other nerds of the school. They provided a different but no less meaningful set of lessons to me.
What is typically described as the extra-curricular activities — with the implied notion that they are luxuries, like an expensive dessert — in fact played a central role in what I most cherished about school: the sense that I was part of a loving community.
And the best extra-curricular activity of all was the school trip. One immediately springs to mind. When I was a sixth-form student I travelled to Whitby and the Yorkshire Moors with all other A-level English Literature students. The landscape was astonishing: the turbulent, green Yorkshire hills, the picturesque coastal town of Whitby. We were studying Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, both of which are set in and around the area we travelled to. The experience made both books visceral for me.
But for many schools, facing steep economic pressure, such opportunities are at grave risk. Inflation and rising energy costs mean it is now more expensive to run a school, and some things, like school trips, will have to be cut. A recent article noted many school leaders are having to make a stark choice: they either lose some school trips or let go of staff. Understandably, many are choosing the former.
A school in Birmingham called Shenley Academy, for instance, runs an annual trip to Bletchley Park, where pupils can learn about the Second World War code breakers. But the headteacher of the school is unsure whether they can afford the trip this year. The rising coach costs make it less affordable. Fair enough, one might say, what is the point of a fancy trip? But imagine what is lost in not being able to visit one of the most exciting areas of Second World War history, of losing access to the past. Learning about this in a classroom is not an adequate substitute.
And it is not just school trips that are being cut. In one school in North Yorkshire the headteacher has wondered whether they can hold a Christmas carol service because of the cost of buses.
I can understand the rationale. Forced to make choices, school leaders have a responsibility to prioritise their staff. But I remember the carol services at my primary school, singing passionately with fellow pupils, trying to impress my mum and my teachers. More profoundly than that, trying to impress my classmates. It is out of such experiences where solid bonds are made. Community and lived experience are just as important as a classroom.
In other news...
Booker Prize shortlist shows an artistic career isn’t over after the bloom of youth
Alan Garner is the oldest author ever shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. If he wins on October 17, it will be on his 88th birthday. After more than 60 years of publishing children’s fantasy novels and British folk tales, he could win Britain’s most prestigious literary prize.
There is something wonderfully encouraging about what writer Henry Oliver describes as “late bloomers”. It shows that an artistic or intellectual career isn’t over after the bloom of youth or the solidity of middle age. African-American novelist Toni Morrison, left, didn’t publish her first book until she was nearly 40. Penelope Fitzgerald, the Booker-Prize winning novelist, didn’t publish her first novel until she was 60. Many say Philip Roth’s golden period was the Nineties — he was in his 60s.
Treacle Walker, Garner’s book, is also the shortest nominated, at around 15,000 words. Wisdom can be beautifully compact, too.
