by Kate Clanchy
In the workers’ street, it is seven steps across a cottage, yet we read on the wall that two adults and ten children lived there at the last census in the 1930s. We try to work out where the beds could have fitted and can’t. We consider the single tap that served all the houses; we hop over the scars of the medieval-style rigs allocated to the villagers by the landlord. When the evacuation happened, the villagers were compensated only for the vegetables they were growing in these rigs. They didn’t own any other piece of Tyneham, though they and their forebears had lived and worked on this land all their lives.
I’ve always been a Hardy-sceptic, in fact, never really credited that rural life in England can have been as primitive or humourless as he described it in the late nineteenth century. But by the time we get to the church, I am revising all that. Here, lilies are laid on the stone that remembers the village boys slaughtered in the First World War, but all the other tombs inside the church are for just one family, the Bonds. They owned this village for centuries, just as in Hardy’s novel the D’Urbervilles owned Tess’s village. The Bonds owned the church too, for the rectors were all scions – often younger brothers – of the squires in the Great Hall. Sometimes, the rector and squire were even the same person. In 1880, for instance, when the church was improved and the rectory built, one Nathaniel Bond did both jobs. He lived in the Great Hall, and the rectory was created for his curate, who, to add to the doubling effect, was married to his wife’s twin. That, I reckon, could go straight in a Hardy novel: nominative determinism, twins, the lot.
Nathaniel Bond was an improver. He also built the Tyneham village school – or rather, he recycled a tithe barn by the church for the purpose, a building approximately the size of the new rectory drawing room. Now, with its pretty pitched roof restored, the school is such a draw to visitors I can hardly squeeze my children in. I decline an offer of a pinafore for my youngest. I hiss at my children, who are in danger of enjoying themselves, to look at how inadequate the place is. The low, narrow space with platform and iron forms was intended for sixty scholars; there must have been barely room to sit down. There was also barely any learning on offer; just reading, writing, and figuring, administered by one teacher and one assistant. The pupils left at twelve, and the paths from here led only to servitude: the farm, the fishing beach, and the servants’ hall. Thomas Hardy, I now see, was not even slightly laying it on a bit thick. I inwardly promise to never again giggle at Jude the Obscure, not even the ‘Done because we are too menny’ line when the children hang themselves to save their parents money. This is serious.
Imagine the school, urge the helpful laminated cards on the benches, in the days of Nathaniel Bond! So I do: the children offering prayers of thanks to the provider of their education, who was also their spiritual leader and the man who owned all their property except their cabbages; the man who owned, effectively, their parents. There must have been a young Jude the Obscure in this classroom, a clever Tess Durbeyfield. They must have had questions, and part of the purpose of this school was to give them an Establishment answer. Nathaniel Bond was not generous when he opened this school; he was self-interested. If he hadn’t done it, his next generation of servants might have turned to the Sunday Schools of the thriving Methodist Movement; might, in the fine West Country way, have rebelled against this awful alliance of landlord and church.
But no one rebels any more. Even here in the West Country, the Methodists and the Church of England, Chapel Street and Church Street, are more or less united. Here in Tyneham, no one is angry. The question of how Nathaniel Bond would pass into heaven through the Needle’s Eye gate when he has such a lot of baggage on his very fat camel is moot. And moot, too – a gentle, cloudy, watercolour moot – the question of how the church of Jesus Christ, who was against property, acquired so much; the question of why this school does not belong to the people who quarried and cut every stone of it, who built it, who maintained it, who used it. It is only me, I feel, who sees this school as a museum of serfdom and daylight robbery. For everyone else, the church and school are lovely ghosts from a gentler age, from the land of lost content.
Which is also how the law of this country treats church schools: as a pretty, harmless, kindly antique. But they are not: they are alive and thriving and have their ideology generously supported by the state. About a third of the schools in England still belong to either the Catholic Church or the Church of England, and most of them operate under the Voluntary Aided system. (There is another, much smaller set of church schools called ‘Voluntary Controlled’, and these get more Church funding in exchange for more Church character; the two are constantly and chronically confused.) The Voluntary Aided arrangement means that all of the day-to-day running and expenses of the school are handed over to the local council, while the Church retains ownership of the buildings and land. The Church also keeps the right to give assemblies, enforce spiritual visits, have a presence on the governing body, and appoint the head teacher only from among their faithful.
Which is quite a lot of power, especially when you consider that in return, the Church has no statutory obligation at all. There is a widespread myth that the Church gives 10 per cent of funding to church schools, but this has never been the case. The clue is in the name, Voluntary Aided. The Catholic Church or C of E supply their VA schools each year, on a strictly voluntary basis, with about 10 per cent of the costs of maintaining the buildings, nothing else.
And even as we are slamming the car doors to leave Tyneham, I am wondering about the detail of that. Because my kids go to a Voluntary Aided church school. This wasn’t my choice; most of the primary schools in my county are C of E, and this one is yards from my door. It’s probably a bit more middle-class than the state one half a mile away, but it still doesn’t have a great reputation. Ofsted says it is ‘satisfactory’, which means it isn’t, very. People keep leaving. During Oldest One’s first year, ten children left his class as places came up in neighbouring, churchier schools. I always asked the parents why, and they said peculiar, Nathaniel Bond-like things in response: ‘St Egg’s has lovely windows,’ was one, and ‘Gillian just wants more discipline; she’s crying out for blackboards,’ was another. Gillian was five.
The other schools had better SAT results, was the truth. They had more middle-class pupils. And they protected these goods with a method to make Nathaniel Bond proud: they specified church attendance criteria on their admissions policies. Being a baptized C of E child whose parents are active church members of St Mungo’s, St Egg’s, or St James’s (Attended more than once a month for more than twelve months. Must be supported by evidence from the vicar) made you a top-priority pupil for the school with the lovely windows, and Gillian’s super-anxious mother had duly joined St Egg’s, even though she was an atheist. Not that this hypocrisy was particular to our area. I personally knew an Orthodox Jew leading the church lesson in Stoke Newington, and a respectable don’s family who had their children baptized twice, in Catholic and Church of England churches, so as to give them a back-up option for primary school.
I have not done any of these things. I am glad our school doesn’t have church attendance criteria. I think praying for entrance stinks; stinks of the lilies in the church of Tyneham, of the class system and everything that lies behind it. On the other hand, Oldest One’s year group is down to three-quarters full, and the corresponding funding is down too. I’d like the school to be fuller and more prosperous. I’d like Oldest One to have more middle-class classmates. I’d also like him to feel free to go to the toilet during the day. At the moment, he won’t, because he thinks the lavatory is too horrible. My friend on the governors’ board says that if we agreed to add in some church attendance criteria on our entrance policy, which might make us more popular, and would in time boost church attendance, the church would give us some more money for our buildings, and we could build a new loo.
Let’s review that again, I think, as we climb the hill to the Tolpuddle Martyrs Memorial. Today, in 2008, we are being
asked to pray for new urinals, just as the children of Tyneham prayed in thankfulness for their landlord allowing them a corner of the land they worked in which to have an inadequate education. How did we get here?
Well, let’s go back another twenty years: Easter, 1988. I am sitting on a train platform, giggling my head off with an older teacher, a tall, glamorous Jamaican woman, whom I have just met and like a lot. We are giggling because we have both just run away from a job interview in the nearby school. They’d left us in the staffroom while they interviewed the third candidate, and, with touching unanimity, we had raised eyebrows at each other, then rolled our eyes towards the door, then nipped off.
All the way down the drive we ripped the place to shreds; it was a Voluntary Controlled C of E comprehensive that had somehow fallen into the hands of an evangelical branch of the church. The English store cupboard was full of antiquated, priggish novels. Year 9 had been asked to write haiku on the true meaning of Easter for homework. There were, and this finished us both off, several acrostic poems on the Crucifixion on the walls. Neither of us thought twice about abandoning the interview. As my companion said, there were plenty more jobs around because only a nutter like me would go into teaching in 1988, and only a nutter like her would stay.
‘Why does anyone go to that school?’ I ask her. I couldn’t understand it. Parents could choose a school in the local area in 1988, and there was a perfectly normal-looking comprehensive just down the road. My new friend waxes serious.
‘Race,’ she says, ‘didn’t you notice? Not a lot of black kids in there. And this is a really mixed area.’
Then, seeing me blanch, she softens her line. ‘Parents,’ she says. ‘They all like to feel they’re getting something a bit special. Keep the riff-raff out. Anything will do, really. You take it from me, all parents are crazy.’
‘Well,’ I say, ‘I still think that place can’t survive. The state of the desks! They were a hundred years old. I’m definitely going to teach in a comprehensive. A real one, I mean. Nothing Voluntary Aided for me.’ And then my train arrives and I cheerfully get aboard.
But it was a faster train than I’d thought, and I had mistaken the direction of travel. As we sat on that platform, the Education Reform Act, which gave parents the right to choose their children’s school regardless of area, was passing through parliament. By the time I got my first job, it was in place. Almost at once, the school with the crucifixion acrostics was in receipt of far more applications, some from miles away, than the lovely multi-racial comprehensive where I started work. As my school suffered and shrank under the ensuing decade of Tory austerity, Acrostic High grew a thick hedge of church-attending, bell-ringing admissions criteria, impenetrable to all but the most literate and determined. It grew its middle-class population, ruthlessly took parental donations, and thrived. When exam results started to be collated and published, Acrostic’s motivated, middle-class pupils made it look marvellous, and it began to build up a reputation as an academic powerhouse. The nearby churches filled up with prospective parents. The bells had never been so well rung. A journalist wrote a feature on the school in 1995 for a national paper and concluded that it did so well because of its ‘lovely ethos’.
And then, finally, just in time to save state education, Labour got in. They upped funding all round. They raised teachers’ pay. But they did not, as they had promised, stop selection or do anything about the religious divisions between schools. In fact, Blair declared war on the ‘bog-standard comprehensive’ and encouraged all sorts of specialization. Under Labour, Acrostic High prospered even further. It stopped looking down-at-heel and behind the times; it sprouted a theatre, a sports hall, a bright, retro-style uniform. Now, it is an academy and sucks in every middle-class child in a twenty-mile radius. In the prospectus, it still attributes all its success to its religious ethos.
2010 and Oldest One doesn’t want to go to the Open Evening. It’s at the Catholic school, and even at ten he is very against God. I don’t really want him to go there either, but I do want a look at the buildings. I watched them go up from the park: a chapel, a rotunda, an atrium, an AstroTurf pitch; architect-designed, curved, coloured. Beautiful, the most beautiful school exteriors I’ve seen. I want to know if the interiors match up.
The neighbourhood believes that the Catholic Church paid for these glorious structures, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. There was a Catholic middle school nearby, with generous grounds, in what is now a very desirable and expensive area of town. The middle school became redundant, and the buildings and playing fields were sold for development for a colossal sum. By law, this money had to be spent on another educational establishment, and the Church insisted it should be Catholic, and now, here it is, on the site of another redundant middle school. It’s not, actually, in a great spot: only half a mile in either direction from two other comprehensives, while the other side of town has no secondary schools at all. But this is what the Church wanted, and under the new, Labour laws designed to encourage diversity, that is what we must have.
We enjoy the tour. The Cookery department makes great pumpkin muffins. The Art department has lovely windows. We are impressed by the library. We are less impressed by the History corridor – but with two lessons of Catholic RE every week here, and a compulsory GCSE in RE too, History must get squeezed. There are large crucifixes in every classroom, 3D ones with writhing Christ statues on top. There are notices about confession, and retreats. The Catholic Church is getting, I reckon, a lot of God for their investment, especially when you consider that much of this is missionary work. This isn’t Birmingham or Liverpool – there really aren’t many Catholics in our town. The school population is at least half Muslim, attracted, I assume, by the general anti-sex vibe.
Then, abruptly, the tour turns left and we are in the chapel. A solemn young man in a long robe explains that this is the most important place in the school. It’s certainly gorgeous to look at: rounded, with heavy walls, embroidered hangings and flickering candles. I wonder if it would be such a bad thing for my son to go to the occasional service here. The priest is still talking; I look at the notice by the door. It’s for a meeting of the Silver Ring Thing group. Silver Ring Thing is an American Christian youth movement. It encourages chastity before marriage, with a silver ring as a reminder. Ickily, in the States, fathers present daughters with the silver rings in mock wedding ceremonies.
My son is already scowling. The young priest asks him if he’d like to pray, and he shakes his head, mulishly, and sits on the end of a pew. The priest smiles and says soothingly that no one has to pray; they can simply think holy thoughts. The chaplaincy has a very wide brief here, and lots of extra help.
‘Do you counsel students?’ I ask. ‘Do lay church people counsel students?’
‘Yes,’ says the priest. They are very lucky that way. In having so many lay people about.
‘To run Silver Ring Thing?’ I demand.
The priest agrees this is one of their programmes.
‘A million dead of AIDS in Africa because of that sort of crap,’ I say, still smiling.
‘A million dead in Africa from AIDS,’ says the priest, ‘which is a sexually transmitted disease.’
‘And,’ I say, ‘when a student comes to you and says he is gay, do you tell him it’s a mortal sin?’
The priest says that his is a loving church and all sorts of confessions are welcome—
‘But you think it’s a mortal sin?’
In the long pause that follows, I hear my son being offered a tube of bubble mixture and a wand by a nice young woman.
‘If you don’t want to pray,’ she is saying, ‘you could just blow a bubble and think of Jesus.’
My son gets to his feet, appalled.
‘We’re just going,’ I say. But she blows the bubble anyway.
‘Yes,’ says the priest, ‘it is a mortal sin. And we do say so. That’s the teaching of the church. But of course you don’t have to choose to send your child here.’
We follow a trail of bubbles out of the door. It is true that I don’t have to send my child here. But I also don’t have a choice about paying, through taxation and my citizenship, for other children to be taught here, and I don’t think anyone should be told that homosexuality is a sin in any state institution, or about Silver Ring Thing anywhere, on even the smallest bit of my money. I think we should agree on state values, things we all believe, and promulgate those. Religion should be for outside school only.
Besides, I think, as I lead my son out into the evening sun, watching the holy bubbles iridesce picturesquely round the stunning Art block, I may have a choice about this school, but I don’t have a choice about the skew this school could give to my choice of school. This new, shiny, religious school could well attract the middle-class parents I see wandering anxiously around the site. They might enrol here, rather than at the other two nearby comprehensives, thus making the comps even less socially balanced than they were to start with. Things could easily get bad enough for me to have to eat humble pumpkin muffin and come crawling back in here to blow a bubble for Jesus, and I really don’t want to do that, not after making such a righteous scene.
The Catholic school down the road does skew my choice of school, but not in the way I expected. The lovely buildings stay perfectly lovely, but over the next seven years its reputation does not solidify, it does not become over-subscribed, and its exam results are mediocre. After a few years, the original head leaves, and it is difficult to appoint another, because anyone above Assistant Principal level must be Catholic, and ours is not a Catholic town. Eventually, the school appoints internally, a newish teacher from a university background, someone with a PhD, but with no Vice Principal experience or record with disciplinary systems. Within eighteen months, the school is emptying, and there are children lighting small fires and smoking just yards from the gate. Ofsted come in and fail the place, singling management and governance out for blame. But there is very little that can be done; the Catholic community isn’t large enough to supply new governors or a better head. In my school our excellent, tough Vice Principal is looking for a headship. She’d love to walk down the block and sort out the Catholic school, but she isn’t just not Catholic; she’s married to a woman. Now, our school fills to overflowing with children escaping from the Catholic school. Even the beautiful buildings start to look battered, litter accumulating against the pretty chapel.