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Experiences of learning within atwentieth‐century radical experimentin education: Prestolee School,1919–1952Catherine Burke a & Mark Dudek ba University of Cambridge , UKb University of Sheffield , UKPublished online: 20 Apr 2010.

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Oxford Review of EducationVol. 36, No. 2, April 2010, pp. 203–218

ISSN 0305-4985 (print)/ISSN 1465-3915 (online)/10/020203–16© 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/03054981003696705

Experiences of learning within atwentieth-century radical experiment in education: Prestolee School, 1919–1952Catherine Burkea* and Mark DudekbaUniversity of Cambridge, UK; bUniversity of Sheffield, UKTaylor and FrancisCORE_A_470192.sgm10.1080/03054981003696705Oxford Review of Education0305-4985 (print)/1465-3915 (online)Original Article2010Taylor & Francis362000000April 2010CatherineBurkeCb552@cam.ac.uk

Prestolee School, at Kearsley, near Bolton in Lancashire, UK, was the site of an experiment ineducation between 1919 and 1952 under the leadership of head teacher, Edward Francis O’Neill(1890–1975). The school attracted much national and international attention over three decadesowing to the unorthodox methods practised by O’Neill and the extraordinarily rich learningenvironment set amidst the industrial poverty of this small mill town. However, we know very littleabout the experience of learning within such a radical experiment in education. This article examinesthe experiences of the pupils through two main sources: archive documents produced between 1925and 1945 and oral testimony recorded in 2008. Consideration is given to the methodologicalchallenges and opportunities of mixed method research—in this case, combining cross-disciplinaryenquiry with oral testimony and documentary analysis. Reading the school building as a text, thechanges in the design of learning spaces over time are foregrounded. Neither a history of school archi-tecture and design nor a social history rooted in memory and the documentary record, the articlerepresents a methodological departure from architectural history and the social history of schooling.

Introduction

How could anyone possibly forget it once they have been pupils of Prestolee CouncilSchool? (Pupil’s letter, 1945)

A pupil’s view of time spent at school is seldom the starting point for an explorationof how a school operates. This is true also of space a child occupies—the school build-ing, its various rooms, corridors, furnishings and equipment. Bringing the two dimen-sions together in historical research is rarer still. In the history of education, pupilexperience is generally recorded, if at all, through the perspective of policy or practice,essentially from an adult viewpoint and while the ‘school’ or ‘classroom’ is an essentialpart of the discourse generated, the overall spatial arrangements and the key design

*Corresponding author. Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 8PQ,UK. Email: Cb552@cam.ac.uk

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features of the education provided within school time are usually left to the imagina-tion. Oral histories of childhood or education have enriched our understanding ofschooling ‘from below’, but most accounts are of schooling in general and there is noexisting micro-history of a twentieth-century school from the perspective of childrenwho attended.

Prestolee, a standard state elementary school serving the local population, was ledby head teacher Edward F. O’Neill (1890–1975) between the years 1919 and 1952,when the transformation of the building and the school yards through a fundamentaldeparture from the school timetable and curriculum was key to the making of a uniquelearning environment that constituted a radical experiment in education. Here, pupils,otherwise destined for a life in manufacturing, were encouraged to see beyond theirimmediate horizons. O’Neill was an educator with a progressive philosophy coupledwith a practical bent for whom the ideas of John Dewey (1859–1952) connectedstrongly with an instinctual understanding of the needs of children. But how was this,by all accounts, extraordinarily child-centred man viewed by the pupils in his care andwhat was their experience of the regime of ‘learning through doing’ that O’Neill devel-oped at Prestolee school? Some documentary evidence, including pupils’ writing, hassurvived due to the interest of mathematics educator, Warwick W. Sawyer, who wasone of the many visitors to the school during the 1940s. These documents, includingletters from ex-pupils and essays written by pupils at the time, illuminate the everydayactivities experienced as well as revealing the most significant memories of learningrecalled by those who had been educated there. Of course, relying on pupils’ writtenaccounts is always limited and does not necessarily allow us to hear the voices of theless literate. Valuable as the archive resources are, a means of enriching the interpre-tation of them has been explored for the purposes of this study through bringing themto the attention of elders of the community who can still recall vivid memories of theirtime as pupils at Prestolee School during the 1930s and 1940s.

To paraphrase the cultural geographer, David Livingstone, this article puts‘learning in its place’ (Livingstone, 2003). In drawing together the experience of timeand place, we examine the experience of learning within a setting where the usualarrangements of time and space were challenged and radically altered in the re-invention of place. The re-ordering of the material school tied together with a radicalapproach to curriculum is our subject. Such a methodological approach is innovativein several ways: the experience of learning is viewed from the dual-perspective of timeand space, the architectural and the pedagogical. This has the effect of drawing atten-tion to the critical but often overlooked relationships between space and time in school-ing. Towards a social-material history of education, the result is neither a history of schoolarchitecture and design nor a social history rooted in memory and the documentaryrecord. The article, therefore, represents a methodological departure from architec-tural history and the social history of schooling. Through such an analysis, the schoolbuilding and what it contains is foregrounded as an organising principle of knowledge,past and present. Learning, through this cross-disciplinary standpoint, can be under-stood as an essential element in the production of knowledge and the experience oflearners can be accessed via the material remnants of the produce of their labours.

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Time and space for learning: archive documents

On his first day as head teacher at Prestolee school, in 1919, Edward F. O’Neill carriedout what was both a symbolic and practical act. He eclipsed from view the school time-table that had until this point in time hung in the school hall, ‘glazed in a handsomeframe’, replacing it with a colour print of the ‘Laughing Cavalier’ (Holmes, 1977,p. 47). To O’Neill, the revolution in schooling that he was about to set in motion restedon changing the existing relationship between time, space and material things. To trans-form the education of young people was an urgent matter of re-design and re-invention.He observed on that morning the current form of schooling and, in an act of makingthe familiar strange, noted how children’s bodies were, as every morning, marchedand drilled in the school playground, the girls separated from the boys, and how theyentered the school building not as individuals but as a group, only after having beenfirst lined up in military style. The pupils then proceeded to sit for most of the rest ofthe day at desks which were screwed to the floor while seven or eight ‘lesson tablets’were administered. The curriculum, based on decisions about what should be learntand for how long, was as much a matter of design for O’Neill as the classroom spacesand the school yard. ‘Let Teachers be Spacious’ was one of his sayings, which alludedto the critical faculties he wished to encourage in his staff (Holmes, 1977, p. 181).

The school was originally designed to be not unlike any other Edwardian Elemen-tary school and was opened in 1911 to serve the children of the population ofKearsley, a small mill town near Bolton situated to the north west of Manchester. Inits original form, the school comprised of an elongated ‘u’ shaped plan with tenclassrooms arranged around a central hall. The headmaster had his own office andinterview room plus an additional classroom located within a first floor which ranacross the west wing of the ‘u’. There were two entrances which were originally segre-gated, one for boys and one for girls, a common arrangement in schools until after theSecond World War. A vivid account given by Gerard Holmes, who taught at theschool during the 1920s, is striking in its reference to the behaviour of pupils, teachersand other staff in relation to the built environment.

On the first morning of his [O’Neill’s] coming it rained. The boys huddled round the frontdoor, the caretaker keeping it shut and batting them with his cap. The girls, separated fromthe boys, played rowdily under an open shed at the back. The staff sat gossiping around afire in the staff room. (Holmes, 1977, p. 46)

This was a school designed, as were all elementary schools of its day, according to aview of the child as passive learner, needing to be corralled into education, and requir-ing to be disciplined from without. The overall shape of elementary schools built atthe beginning of the twentieth century, of which Prestolee is typical, was largely deter-mined on the basis of two key criteria: first, the layout of the classrooms and second,the number of pupils to be accommodated. Hence, a consensual understanding ofpedagogy determined the original school design which is not dissimilar to that of theearly twenty-first century upon which it continues to operate.

A very similar school is featured in a seminal work which provided a practicaltemplate and a consensual view about school design from 1874 when it was first

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published (Robson, 1874). It was E. R. Robson (1836–1917), first principal architectof the London School Board, who introduced to England the Prussian system ofseparate classrooms organised around a central communal hall. Previously lessonshad taken place within vast open spaces (Seaborne & Lowe, 1977). Robson felt thisto be too inflexible and designed classrooms to accommodate five rows of doubledesks ranged from front to back, a dimension of approximately 11 feet, determined,it seems, by the distance a teacher’s voice would carry. The desks, usually screwed tothe floor, had enough circulation space for the masters to inspect the academicprogress of each child. The arrangement allowed the child to leave their desk duringthe lesson, an advance for that time. The classrooms would also include a generousarea at the front for display, presentation and general circulation. The second crite-rion established class sizes on the basis of a predetermined schedule of accommoda-tion, with an optimum number of 40–60 pupils in each class. This was based uponthe numbers which could be comfortably serviced and controlled by a single teacherand would have been the kind of setting that O’Neill was familiar with, having trainedas a pupil teacher and having taught in elementary schools before arriving at Prestoleein 1919. In spaces such as these, control and strict regimentation were the key peda-gogic principles with very little consideration for active play: the external areas wereusually left-over spaces, overshadowed asphalt yards, more reminiscent of a prisonthan of a children’s playground. There would have been glazing along the internalclassroom walls to facilitate surveillance by the head teacher during class-times.

Although predominantly single storey, with distinctive 45 degree slate roofs andlarge dormer windows protruding into the roof space, Prestolee school was designedaccording to many aspects of Robson’s enlightened recommendations. The originalarchitects had appreciated Robson’s concerns for the health of the working classesand so the children were to be kept well ventilated in lofty spaces proportionatelyrelating plan width to height. The central hall was lit by 46 windows (Holmes, 1977,p. 161).

It was a robust and adaptable framework within which O’Neill could pursue hisexperiments in education. Certainly there is evidence that during his time, some ofthe smaller classrooms were knocked together to provide larger spaces for sharedteaching groups. We also know that the windows provoked a great deal of activityduring the opening weeks of the Second World War as all kinds of blinds and deviceshad to be invented, designed and installed by the pupils to achieve blackout of theschool so that it could operate in the evenings (Holmes, 1977, p. 160). The buildingwould have seemed advanced, even luxurious for its time compared to most domesticbuildings of the period, and a splendid alternative to the home environments for manyof the children attending in its early years.

The story of the school and its headmaster, ‘The Idiot Teacher’, has been told byGerard Holmes in a somewhat hagiographic account published at the end of O’Neill’scareer of over 30 years at Prestolee; and there have been more recent reflections onthe impact of this experiment in education (Burke, 2005; Burke & Grosvenor, 2007).However, to date ex-pupils have not contributed the memory of their experiences tothe recorded history of the school. Towards this end, contact was made with a

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daughter of two ex-pupils, still living in the vicinity of Prestolee. She recruited a dozenothers to the project and seven of these, four women and three men, took part inrecorded conversations over documents and walking tours of the school in August2008. Their perspectives on space and time for learning at Prestolee school haveenriched the known published record as documented by Holmes and others. Despitea major redesign taking place at the time, it was still possible for the ex-pupils to ‘see’O’Neill’s school, although the unorthodox structures and arrangements they hadknown and helped to create had long been removed.

The original integrated hall, at one time a key space for learning through research,the exchange of ideas and materials, and a fundamental element of the historical planin O’Neill’s progressive experiment, was through the redesign now divided in two,providing additional classrooms but effectively turning one long end of the old hallinto a somewhat ill proportioned internal corridor. The result has undermined one ofO’Neill’s key principles, that of a fluid relationship between classrooms and the maincommunal hall, where half or whole school events could take place, whilst smallergroups continued to operate in adjacent rooms.

For pupils who attended Prestolee school in the 1930s or 1940s, between the agesof four and twelve, extraordinary things happened every day and this became theirnormal routine. Time and space was modified to such an extent that their learningexperience was unlike that of their peers. Pupils recounted a mix of spontaneity andformality regarding time. For example, collective singing would mark the start ofevery day. However, if O’Neill was in the mood for singing, this would be extendedas one recalled: ‘sometimes if he felt like it we’d sing half the day’. After several HMI(His Majesty’s Inspectorate) inspections during the 1920s a more formal approach tothe arrangement of time for teaching the basics was introduced. For pupils, thismeant that by individual agreement with O’Neill and the other teaching staff, theirweek was organised between time for the ‘basics’ (reading, writing and sums, referredto as the ‘primaries’ in Holmes’s account) and time for the ‘optionals’—practicalactivities arising from research and responsibilities including looking after the manyschool pets, maintenance and any amount of construction work. It was thereforepossible for a pupil to complete their allotted ‘basics’ by the early part of the week,thereafter being free to carry out research based activities, many of which were prac-tically based and designed to develop or maintain the building, the grounds and whatthey contained. Often ‘basics’ could be completed during the evenings at school, inan environment more suited than the homes that for many were cramped and notconducive to study. This was a disciplined regime, as one ex-pupil recalled,

We all had our jobs to do—gardening, library, sometimes didn’t like gardening but had todo it. Had to finish ‘basics’ before we were able to do ‘optionals’. But could come back atnight to finish.

Unlike other children of their generation in their locality, they regularly and eagerlyreturned to school during the evenings alongside ex-pupils, family and friends to takepart in leisure activities or to complete their school work. Over time, they participatedin the building of a transformational school environment, including the replacement

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of classrooms by workshops and the reconfiguration of an upper floor hall into whatbecame known as the ‘palace of youth’. The curriculum consisted of: the manufac-ture of their own learning aids, including books, weighing machines and measuringdevices; the fashioning of useful and functional furniture for inside and out, for homeand for school; the making of cages and stalls to house school pets; the design andconstruction of a milk bar, an outdoor stage, illuminations for the whole school,flower trellises and vegetable plots, several towers and a working windmill containingseveral rooms that stood thirty feet high, garden pools including one for swimming, aroundabout climbing frame, several bridges spanning gardens and ponds and a goathouse. The school soon developed an ‘air of being lived in’ with ‘hand-made individ-ual desks or chairs, bookcases and tables enamelled or chintz covered and embel-lished with flowers in vases’ (Holmes, 1977, p. 151). For Prestolee pupils, school daysoccupied practically all of their time. These were ordinary children from poor familieswhose opportunities in life were restricted because of their social origins and theirgeographical location. In short, born during the 1920s and 1930s, they were destinedfor a limited elementary education preparing them for a life in domestic service or inthe local cotton and paper mills.

Time and space: memory and recollection

Historians using oral history strategies to elicit memory have recognised the value ofthe use of material objects as sensory triggers, including photographs of people,spaces and places (Grosvenor et al., 1999; Burke & Prosser, 2007; Spencer, 2007).Few have used buildings themselves as stimuli, although the work of Grosvenor andLawn offers important case studies (Grosvenor & Lawn, 2001a, b). Here, given therich history of this particular school as a redesigned pedagogical tool and the essentialpart that the pupils played in its making, the building itself—the classrooms, halls,corridors and yard—were employed as the principal matter for individual and collec-tive recollection of the experience of learning. The effect was significant: situated inthe school as currently operating where traces of the extraordinarily different arrange-ments of spaces and equipment that existed half a century ago had long ago beentotally removed, the small group of ex-pupils were able to recall their experiences insitu, illuminating contemporary spaces with their recollected images. For thepurposes of clarity, the testimony of ex-pupils recorded in 2008 will be presented assuch, while the references to accounts of learning from pupils attending the school inthe past, evidenced in archive material, will be referred to as ‘past pupils’.

Standing inside the school, ex-pupils could see through layers of alteration andchange and describe in detail what they remembered where, which in turn generatedmore discussion of their collective experiences as pupils. Memories of the experienceof school spaces were thus shaped by a process of reconciliation between past andpresent. Ex-pupils had in effect to work their memories harder to re-‘see’ the spacesthey had once inhabited. Layers of more recent re-design had to be peeled away inthe process of re-telling in order to ‘see’ again the former spatial arrangements andmaterial objects and to find their ‘place’ once again in the school. The building,

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though bland and unremarkable in the present day, was revealed as richly embeddedwith traces of past adventures in education.

Walking the building and school yard generated the recall of episodic memoriesand reinforced much of what is already known about the pedagogical approachadopted and developed by O’Neill. However, the conversations occasionally gener-ated recollections that challenged what is known and fractured the benign image of aschool modelled to fit the child.

In one of the classrooms, an ex-pupil recalled precisely where she had beendisciplined by O’Neill with a cane, an extraordinary revelation given the account ofthis progressive educator, fundamentally opposed to corporal punishment. It wasemphasised by the raconteur how unusual this was—nevertheless, the fact that a caneremained in the school despite its many material changes was surprising. Alterationof objects rather than disposal of them is demonstrated through this story. O’Neillhad gained experience of class teaching in a previous appointment, at the age of 18when he was responsible for 65 eight-year-old children, where he did what wasexpected of him but refused to punish the children physically. This he described as ‘adreadful period ... I used to stand all day with a cane in my hand but never hit thechildren with it’ (O’Neill, North West Sound Archive, 1972). He believed thatdiscipline should grow from within the child, not be enforced from outside, and thatlearning in an atmosphere of freedom would facilitate this. Nevertheless, ex-pupilsrecalled the struggle to control his temper that occasionally would snap: ‘He had avery fiery tongue, you know. He’d show you up sometimes a little bit’.

Collective discussion in one of the classrooms was prompted by memorabilia thatex-pupils had brought to share. In recollecting their experiences, they pointed tophotographs and theatre tickets and were forthcoming with accounts of being takento the opera, cinema, museums, galleries, and to places far and wide. This corre-sponds with archive evidence of visits to such places as well as two or three weeksummer camps. Outdoor adventures might take place as part of the general curricu-lum through local ‘research walks’, while a three-week trip to the Isle of Arran and atrip to France are mentioned briefly in a letter from a past pupil to Warwick Sawyerrecalling their time at the school during 1922. Discussion about the school hallprompted recollection that they were as pupils regularly exposed to contemporaryaffairs by means of daily newspapers and periodicals donated, a day late, by localshops. These were set out around the walls of the central hall as in a lending library.Learning in an atmosphere of freedom led many ex-pupils’ contemporaries to regardPrestolee as a ‘do as you please’ school. Opposition came initially from some parents,governors, teachers’ unions and the Local Education Authority. There was fear of theeffects of reduced standards and health and safety (Seery, in Burke, 2005, p. 272).O’Neill preferred the term ‘do it yourself school’. There were limitations on their free-dom of expression and certain rules that were to be obeyed. O’Neill insisted that theyprint their hand-writing and for some this had resulted in a lack of confidence in writ-ing that had lasted into adulthood. There is evidence that HMI inspectors wereconcerned about literacy at the school as a result of their visits during the 1920s andtheir preference for ‘calligraphy’ is mentioned by Holmes, who argues that increases

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in amount and speed of pupil writing had jeopardised style rather than any set instruc-tion (1977, p. 62). An ex-pupil recalled, ‘He [O’Neill] said you never found bookswith joined writing’ and so they should print their own. Some children broke the ruleand attempted to join their letters in writing, clearly aware that this was an acceptedform of writing used by adults. One ex-pupil recalled a specific episode:

I was trying to join my letters and Mrs O’Neill [O’Neill’s wife who also taught at theschool] came up behind me and said, ‘we don’t do that at Prestolee School’. She neverever taught us. He [O’Neill] said you never saw a book with real writing so we don’t dothat. … And I asked him and I said why and he said because that is the college way that’slike writing in the colleges, and that’s why he would never learn us.

Another ex-pupil experienced the competing form of handwriting instruction of thetime and preferred the approach taken at Prestolee.

I went to another school because my dad went into hospital and it was at Kearsley, StStephens, and I spent I think three days writing ‘e’ ‘e’ ‘e’ like that joined up—useless! Itwas boring after coming from here doing that.

Such was O’Neill’s concern to influence the lives of his pupils beyond the schoolspaces and school time that he went to enormous lengths to maintain control.O’Neill relied on the all-through elementary school system in order to keep contactfrom the earliest years of a child’s life in the school until they commenced employ-ment. After the introduction of the 1944 Education Act, this became increasinglydifficult. Some pupils left the school after taking the 11+ examination, which wasdesigned to select the notionally more intelligent children for grammar school andan academic education. O’Neill resented this, as the pressure from parents to teachto the test in effect broke the central plank of his educational philosophy, whichrelied on the mix of older and younger children of mixed abilities and predilectionslearning together and the retention of the most academic alongside the mostpractical with their hands.

It appears that O’Neill not only wanted to control the arrangement of space andmaterials in school, he also wished to manage as much of the time of his pupils aspossible: both while they attended Prestolee as pupils and after they had left theschool. For some, this could be experienced as a form of restriction. According to theaccount of one past pupil:

O’Neill was jealous of us going to night school and persuaded some boys to go to PrestoleeSchool at night for tuition, but I believe this fell through and their specialised educationwas arrested.

For O’Neill, the school building itself had its limits in extending the pedagogy intothe lives of pupils. He therefore purchased an industrial unit—a disused mill—in thetown and encouraged his past pupils to use this to manufacture and sell items. O’Neillhad the idea of a works where the children could make things to sell using their differ-ent talents. He knew that poor children could never compete with those from richerhomes because they did not have the clothes or the style, so he tried to secure employ-ment for them still under his aegis. According to one ex-pupil’s recollection, O’Neill

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was always upset about the way the wealth was spread and he felt that children inschools such as Prestolee,

weren’t given equal opportunities because you didn’t only have to pass the 11+, you hadto go for an interview and you could be turned down … a lot of parents couldn’t evenafford the books.

He went on to recall:

when I was 14 and I left school he [O’Neill] came around to our house one day and hesaid: ‘I’ve got an idea … I’m going to open a factory. All the ones who are good at art I’llhave in the art dept’. Out of his own pocket he paid for it—his wife would have nothing todo with it—she was the academic. When I finished work in the afternoon, I used to goevery night.

This could be interpreted as an act of realistic benefaction given the restricted oppor-tunities available to school leavers, or as one which betrayed O’Neill’s over-bearingnature and his need to control the lives of others. He was a practical socialist whoresented the restrictions that inevitably befell those born into relatively deprivedfamilies and communities and held an extended notion of what a school could be.

Time and space for learning through research

Learning through research was a key pedagogical tool for O’Neill. Problem solving,enquiry and recognising what interested children were the starting points and themaking of things in the process of discovering new knowledge was the ideal. Extensivememos to teachers were produced to explain the rationale and the means by whichresearch should function as a first principle in the teaching and learning experience.A school building originally designed to support didactical and traditional instruc-tion-based pedagogy was from this point of view an obstacle if research were to playa central part. The curriculum and timetable were impossibly restrictive as research,if it was to be meaningful, required open-ended arrangements of time and extendednotions of space. Therefore, the building interior and exterior and everything itcontained was re-configured to go some way to supporting this practice, as was thetime allocated to research activities. The practical activities that resulted became theresearch based curriculum.

Recalling the curriculum, ex-pupils remembered the time restrictions on theiractivities not in terms of lesson times but otherwise. Each pupil had a new project tocomplete every two weeks and ‘there was a choice from three or four topics’ offeredby O’Neill. Research was interpreted broadly and included the construction of allsorts of devices that were designed by pupils and O’Neill together to meet a need,using real tools and salvaged materials for the construction of large equipment.Research included practical experiments.

Experiments—buckets of water—filled and swung around to learn about centrifuge—Noone ever was injured.

As one past pupil explained to Warwick Sawyer, during the 1940s:

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One of the exercises we had was building a tower about twenty feet high with broom stickslashed together with rope. We thought that someday we would bridge the local canal inthe same way.

‘Optionals’ which could be chosen once ‘basics’ were completed included such thingsas building and gardening activities inside or outside in the school grounds. An ordi-nary tarmac school yard was over time transformed into an extraordinary fair gardenwith spaces for exercise, growing vegetables, cereals and fruit trees in large numbersand special spaces for performance. Past pupils’ accounts of the construction process,recorded during their time as pupils in the 1940s, betray a deep engagement with thedetail.

In the making of the stage we had to get the foundation laid. First of all we had to start onthe towers; in the making of them we had to chip the tarmac out to a square. We had tobuild tunnels under the stage to let the rain run through, and the drainings of the lake.After that we had to fill it with broken tarmac, and then we had to pour on pure cement.Last of all we colour washed it with paintcrete. Mr O’Neill planted some beautiful flowerson it.

An ‘article’ on the school yard written by Kathleen Longworth for Sawyer in 1944describes the view that a visitor might see:

All the way round the school yard, we have stone seats, with pieces of wood where you cansit down. Mr O’Neill and the oldest boys have made them. There are also log seats andwooden ones. On either side of the stone seats, there are fruit trees planted, generally anapple and a pear tree. At the front of the seats it is smothered in pink carnations, which isa beautiful sight …

The details with which children described the various buildings and constructionsaround the school betray their intimate involvement in their making. Hence the goathouse is described by a past pupil as:

… a small brick building about five feet by four feet made up of about three hundredbricks, has a roof made out of wood. The wood is covered with felting which is held downwith plaster laths. The wall is nine inches wide up to about eight bricks high, then fromthere to the top is four and a half inches wide … inside it has a stall and a loose box. Thestall has now got a goat in it … in front of the building there is an enclosure for the goat torun about in. Round one side of the enclosure there is a diamond brick wall and at theother side there are railings … part of the enclosure is grass and part tarmac.

In order that children were supported in their endeavours, and as a form of literacydevelopment, the ‘magazine tables’ in O’Neill’s classroom contained, among otheritems, magazines such as Woodworker and The Illustrated Carpenter and Builder. Apartfrom these issues that were donated to the school by the publishers, and O’Neill’sown talent in practical applications, it seems that there was little in the way of formalinstruction. This approach to construction was learned by one ex-pupil who recalledthat there was no planning of the constructions in school and that this informalmethod left a lasting legacy: ‘Planning of constructions? No no—never planned but Ican build anything, a greenhouse, I can build a house, me!’ O’Neill was a very prac-tical man and had received little formal education himself yet could turn his hand toanything. Another ex-pupil recalled:

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… when he [O’Neill] got married himself they had no money and he made all his furnitureout of orange boxes. They were good quality orange boxes then—good timber, you know.

And orange boxes of ‘good quality’ continued to be used by O’Neill, but this time inschool, where each pupil was given an orange box to arrange as a sort of desk whichwas fashioned to hold all the tools, materials and books that that child needed at anygiven time.

Ex-pupils recalled that they each had individual desks with painted orange boxeson top set against a wall where their own books for research were placed. ‘O’Neillregarded it as important that every child should have a place to keep a few of theirpossessions, and arranged for each child to be given a small box to decorate and usefor this purpose. Some children would spend a whole day deciding whether to pastea blue or a red piece of paper on the lid of the box’. As Sawyer explained in an articlewritten for The Prestwich Guide, on 30 July 1943, O’Neill let them do this, as ‘theparalysis, built up over years, could not be expected to disappear overnight’.

One example of the construction work that so impressed the mathematics educatorWarwick Sawyer, when he visited during the 1940s and which featured in the PathéNews film about the school, was the ‘John Billy Mill’. The film was entitled ‘Lessonswithout tears (aka Lessons without fears)’ and was released in March 1945. The film,lasting nine minutes, shows children in the playground where there are lots of woodenclimbing frames with ropes to swing from, pools of water, and a large model windmillwhere children are having a tea party. Various shots show children working in theschool garden: they plant saplings and spray fruit trees.

Indoors, the film shows shots of very small children playing with wooden toys,while a tame pigeon hops around; shots of children eating dinner; shots of boys in thecarpenters’ shop; and various shots of girls playing on a trapeze in the gymnasium.There are shots of children being served hot drinks in a canteen made and run bythemselves. Finally, a panning shot of pupils playing draughts and reading is followedby a close up of a boy working in the school library. Music and commentary accom-pany the images and the message is that learning is fun in this unusual school whereno one wants to go home.

The construction and maintenance of the windmill was well remembered by ex-pupils.

But that [referring to the windmill], that’s a masterpiece that, isn’t it? We’d have to go andtie it up with rope on a winter’s night if it were windy—it was going around that fast. Mybrother made it. … I don’t remember it being built, I remembered playing on it. I camewhen I was three … that would have been 1936.

For some, the opportunity to learn to build, mend and repair at school had shapedtheir adult lives.

I was no good at school … my sister was … I could do this sort of thing [construction] itsaved my life, this sort of thing. We were bottom of the class but he asked us to paint hiscar—can you imagine that—a headmaster today sending two 12 year old lads to paint his car?

It is unclear from conversations with ex-past pupils how any of these magnificentconstructions were planned and designed. But there are clues in the archive. The

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archive contains typed memos by O’Neill, with occasional pencilled additionalremarks, about the teaching of what he called ‘Activity Arithmetic’, with detailedinstructions about the use of large scale equipment (all of which was made in theschool out of rough and ready materials by pupils and O’Neill) and ‘floor drawing’.Floor drawing consisted of using chalked floorboards for measuring set lengths anddrawing diagrams on the floor such as squares, rectangles and dolls’ houses. O’Neillprovided some examples in memos to his teachers written in 1924: ‘Hot cross bunsmay be drawn on the floor and if they can use the green chalk for cabbages, the allot-ments will quickly come into being’.

Scale was important and O’Neill believed that through counting, weighing andmeasuring real objects and artefacts for a purpose, mathematics would become mean-ingful. Sticks of all lengths might be used for floor drawing as well as ropes knottedin yards and feet for measuring curved objects. ‘Apparatus too big to lose’ was usedin the teaching of mathematics that was always connected with a real constructionproject. The building became part of the maths equipment. O’Neill noticed that inteaching counting, ‘some children would rather daub their fingers around the class-room walls and count the bricks’ or ‘use the boards of the floor’.

The challenge for O’Neill was to inject movement and reality into the learning ofmathematics. For this the school building necessarily had to be utilised in unorthodoxways. He urged his staff:

Use the passages, the Hall and the yard, always if you can GET SOMEWHERE FRESH.If children are to have room for practical arithmetic, they must overflow from the class-room, and take over the school as part of their apparatus.

Memos regarding the teaching of mathematics indicate that older pupils were encour-aged to mark their own work and this was reiterated by ex-pupils, as one recalled:

In the top class the answer book was there and we’d mark our own sums. But he’d checkit. That was trust—he put trust in you to do the right thing.

While far more value was placed on the process than the outcome, for some, theprocess left them feeling unsupported. This letter from a past pupil, written to Sawyerin 1944, exposes some frustration with the methods:

Personally I found it very difficult to learn mathematics alone. We worked to a ‘plan’ whichgave the hours for certain work. We took the problems from one book and looked at theback of same to see if our answers were right. I left school a dud at maths but with a goodgeneral knowledge.

Time and space for leisure and pleasure: ‘the Palace of Youth’

The origins of what became known as ‘The Palace of Youth’, which became estab-lished during the war years, are recorded in a letter to Warwick Sawyer. According toO’Neill in a letter to Sawyer dated 1945, it was started, ‘by a few of the old boys andgirls who were getting fed up with dancing to a broken down old gramophone in anempty classroom’. As early as 1921, the school was open every evening for games,dancing and carrying on with school based tasks, as one ex-pupil recalled, ‘We’d be

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here till half past nine, ten o’clock at night’. When war broke out in September 1939,the ‘black-out’ closed down the night activities for a short period while the building’smany windows were dressed with improvised blinds, each decorated on the inside togive a pleasant interior ornamentation.

The huge classroom windows and those between the classrooms and central hall were soondealt with; but, high up, under the hall roof, so high up that a new extending ladder hadto be bought to tackle the job, were those forty-six windows which provided light andventilation to the hall. (Holmes, 1977, p. 161)

This perilous activity was carried out by O’Neill and the pupils ‘without accident’ andensured the continuation of the school’s activities during the winter evenings. Soon,the school was commissioned to house a fire-crew and later, the crew of balloonbarrages. To accommodate these, an extended evening activity space was devised ina room on the second floor originally intended for handicraft and abandoned sincethe establishment of workshops on the ground floor. This was to become a dancingroom and lounge.

The youth centre room used to be one of the most ugly classrooms in the school. Now itis one of the nicest. … All around the room are wooden seats with gaily coloured awningsover the top. There are wooden toadstools for the children to sit on. On the walls allaround the room are views of this district drawn and painted by an old boy from P. In onecorner is the player piano … a lot of records also. (Holmes, 1977, p. 162)

The hall was furnished with a new balcony known as the ‘Moonlight Balcony’, madefrom a salvaged 16-foot beam which was ‘parbuckled on to the school roof in theblackout, and the boys worked it along and through the window’. This was describedin detail for Warwick Sawyer in an account written on 10 August 1944 by a 13-year-old female past pupil of Prestolee.

There is a balcony. Hanging from it are branches full of pretty paper flowers. There is ashelf all along the front of the balcony with model swans on. There are also two bookcases.There is a swinging couch and various other seats … in another corner there is a large stonefireplace with some red paper and some coal in to represent a fire. … There is a screen onwhich the films are shown. In the corner there is a seat made out of a log.

Like many of the reconstructions in the school, this furniture was constructed fromsalvaged wood, in this case that firemen had requisitioned from the Salford Blitz. Twolarge mirrors, also bought second hand, completed the décor. ‘Sunsets’ on colouredcut-outs filled the darkened windows. Paper hollyhocks and laburnum festooned thealcoves. The light-shades were moons and stars and the walls were covered with amural of local landscape scenes painted by a past pupil. This was an extraordinaryspace by accounts made at the time of its use as well as by those recollecting theirmemories of it.

Conclusion

In putting learning in its place, this article has drawn attention to key elements ofschooling that are arguably so familiar that they become easily overlooked: the

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relationship between time and space in curriculum design. In the historiography ofthis extraordinary school, to date, scholars have considered adult accounts andcommentaries. The opportunity to engage the experience of ex-pupils by means oftheir reflections in and on the built environment has thrown light on many details butthe cross-disciplinary approach adopted, drawing together the historical and architec-tural critiques, has illuminated the relationship between time and space. An extendednotion of architecture was at play here in the senses that the school building occupiedthe time of pupils and their families outside of the school day and beyond their schooldays and the curriculum extended to incorporate the spaces of home and village life.Pupils purchased school supplies locally; the various pieces of furniture that theyconstructed at school were needed at home, for example, cots for babies.

It would have clearly been impossible for O’Neill to achieve a sustained pedagogybased on research and ‘learning through doing’ with sole attention to material condi-tions or through merely changing the school timetable. By re-designing time andspace and the relationship between these in the context of a research-based pedagogy,a radical curriculum was experienced. Ex-pupils were aware that the school wasdifferent from the norm and most of those able to remember and reflect on their expe-rience today saw that the school had served them well. In finding their place onceagain within the school building and grounds, ex-pupils at Prestolee, although havingan extraordinary story to tell, were motivated in ways not dissimilar to pupils attend-ing this or any school today. Place matters—not only as a trigger in recalling pastexperience but in living and learning within schools today. Time matters too, and notonly allocation of time within the curriculum but the pace of learning. As one recentprimary school aged pupil commented, schools should have, ‘an “own pace room”where you can go at your own pace in English and maths and work from any text bookyou want’ (Burke & Grosvenor, 2003, p. 23).

‘Let teachers be spacious’ was one of O’Neill’s ‘proverbs’ that were written boldlyand displayed around the school walls. Just as architects think of space first and timesecond when designing spaces for learning, teachers are less likely to consider orexperiment with space than time. This article has, through the testimonies of ex-pupils and the documented accounts of past pupils, revealed how embedded notionsof time and space are in the design of schools. This is true of the past as well as in thepresent which is seeing the review and re-design / re-building of up to half of theprimary schools in England through the government’s Primary Capital Programme.The unorthodox experience of learning at Prestolee school serves us well in bringingto the fore a pedagogy that, while unusual in its time, chimes with contemporary shiftsin educational policy and practice. ‘Children as Researchers’, ‘Learning throughEnquiry’, ‘Place Based’ or ‘Problem Based Learning’ and ‘Knowledge BasedSchools’, are only some recent initiatives which appear to be leading trends in primaryschooling internationally. The reviews of the Primary School Curriculum conductedby the UK Government and by the University of Cambridge are also pointing to theneed to make learning real, connect with community developments, and motivatepupils through research based learning. The ‘extended school services’ is a furthercontemporary initiative that sees the primary school as the hub of children’s services

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and community well-being. The experience of learning at Prestolee school, by allaccounts an extraordinary environment, can be a source of reference for those design-ing ‘ordinary’ schools for tomorrow that might ‘have everything for children’(O’Neill, quoted in Holmes, 1977, p. 187).

Notes on contributors

Dr Catherine Burke is Senior Lecturer in the History of Education at the Faculty ofEducation, University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on the relationshipbetween pedagogy and place in the design of schooling from the nineteenthcentury to the present day. She has co-authored two books with Ian Grosvenor,School (2008, Reaktion Press) and The school I’d like. Children and young people’sreflections on an education for the 21st century (2003, Routledge).

Mark Dudek is a Research Fellow at the School of Architecture, University ofSheffield and an architect in practice specialising in the design of children’s envi-ronments. Mark has written and broadcast on many aspects of school and pre-school architecture. The second edition of Kindergarten architecture waspublished in September 2000. Other publications include Building for young chil-dren, published by the National Early Years Network (2001) and Architecture ofschools—the new learning environments, published by the Architectural Press(2002). Children’s spaces, an edited collection of essays on children’s urbanculture, was published in August 2005. He completed a book published byBirkhauser in 2007 entitled Schools—a design manual.

References

Primary

Prestolee School Archive, deposited at the University of East Anglia, consists of two volumes ofphotographs and cuttings and one box containing memos, notes and instructions for theteaching of certain subjects in O’Neill’s hand. The box also contains books on various topicsconstructed by the children during the 1930s and 1940s as well as some detailed accounts ofthe school and the experiences of learning written by pupils for the mathematics academic W.W. Sawyer.

Conversations with ex-pupils recorded on 28 August 2008 at Prestolee School. The group consistedof seven men and women who were pupils taught by O’Neill during the 1930s and 1940s.

North West Sound Archive. Interview with O’Neill, 1972, recorded by Ken Howarth, BoltonPublic Libraries and Archives.

Secondary

Burke, C. (2005) ‘The school without tears’. E. F. O’Neill of Prestolee School, History ofEducation, 34(3), 263–275.

Burke, C. & Grosvenor, I. (2007) The progressive image in this history of education: stories of twoschools, Visual Studies, 22(2), 155–168.

Burke, C. & Grosvenor, I. (2003) The school I’d like. Children and young people’s reflections on aneducation for the 21st century (London, Routledge).

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Grosvenor, I. & Lawn, M. (2001a) In search of the school: space over time, Bildung und Erzhung,1, Spring, 55–70.

Grosvenor, I. & Lawn, M. (2001b) ‘When in doubt, preserve’: exploring the traces of teaching andmaterial culture in English schools, History of Education, 30(2), 117–129.

Grosvenor, I., Lawn, M. & Rousmaniere, K. (Eds) (1999) Silences and images: the social history ofthe classroom (Canterbury, Peter Lang).

Holmes, G. (first published 1952) The idiot teacher. A book about Prestolee School and its HeadmasterE. F. O’Neill (London, Faber) (1977 edition, published by the Bertrand Russell PeaceFoundation).

Humphries, S. (1981) Hooligans or rebels? An oral history of working-class childhood and youth, 1889–1939 (Oxford, Basil Blackwell).

Livingstone, D. (2003) Putting science in its place: geographies of scientific knowledge (Chicago,University of Chicago Press).

Prosser, J. & Burke, C. (2007) Childlike perspectives through image-based educational research,in: J. G. Knowles & A. Cole (Ed.) Handbook of the arts in qualitative research: perspectives,methodologies, examples and issues (London, Sage), 407–420.

Robson, E. R. (1972) (first published 1874) School architecture: practical remarks on the planning,designing, building and furnishing of school houses (Leicester, Leicester University Press).

Seaborne, M. & Lowe, R. (1977) The English school: its architecture and organization. Vol. 2:1870–1970 (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul).

Spencer, S. (2007) A uniform identity: schoolgirl snapshots and the spoken visual, History ofEducation, 36(2), 227–246.

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