Ted Thomas.

I have no individual connection with the story of Risinghill. I came to this through personal interest. The politics and nature of education has been a major fascination of mine since I was a teenager. My reasons for wanting to be involved go back years and years to my time at school. I was born in Coventry on December 27th 1983 but grew up in Ullesthorpe, Leicestershire. Diagnosed, as it felt at the time, with a learning difficulty at the age of nine it felt like some nameless disease rather than a problem that could be constructively worked through. Second to that was the feeling of not being able to understand the rhyme or reason for what was deemed necessary around me, both for me and for other people. Beyond that I had a sense there was something much more fundamentally wrong. I grew up being very creative; I created stories, which my mum and dad would write down for me in a big red book; I spent hours and hours inventing and drawing cartoon characters and even once made my own Batmobile out of used boxes. I also, from the age of 8, had a passionate desire to be a filmmaker and remember waking up one morning with the idea supplanted in my mind. But there was no such world for me to put this into at school. But more than that I found where there should have been creativity, like art classes, this was mitigated by a ruthless environment that didn’t care about either creativity or even learning; more than the constant attempt to bend children and young people into some desired academic shape usually just resulted in them snapping. Risinghill came at me like a surprise. In my final year of University I decided to research and write a dissertation about the issue of freedom in education over the last half century in England, and also specifically look at what has variously been called democratic schools, free schools, alternative schools or non-authoritarian schools. The first school I read about whilst at University that, at first sight, represented something both different and better was Summerhill. Summerhill was opened in the 1920’s and runs to this day, and is possibly the most famous democratic and libertarian school in the world. I then very quickly started to devour the works of David Gribble who has written about schools like this all over the world. ‘Risinghill: Death of a Comprehensive School’ both fitted in with all this and did not. I discovered this book in my second year whilst beginning my research into this area. Most of the schools I looked at were either private or independent and had been for children of parents who were relatively wealthy. Risinghill had been a State school and had been in one of the poorest areas of Islington, London. It both fitted in with the mainstream of education of the 60’s and completely didn’t. It challenged various class notions of education that children from working class areas ‘couldn’t handle freedom’; something even AS Neil, the founder of Summerhill, had believed at one point. In the simplistic debate to be constantly found in the media that put freedom and Private or Independent Schools at one end of the spectrum and equality and State Schools at the other, this story, as told in Leila’s book, struck a chord along with the whole area of democratic and libertarian education which did not fit in with the crude simplicities of red, blue, yellow, left, right, centre. The story of both Risinghill and the whole history of British educational policy were never that simplistic, something so un-simplistic it can’t be reflected on here. ‘Risinghill: Revisited’ was a project I happened by when I was scrawling through the Internet looking for information about Risinghill. Initially I contacted the group to enquire about when their book would be available. It never dawned on me that I could become directly involved. That I now have, it feels like a wonderful opportunity and a learning curve. This book, I hope, will raise questions about education both then and now and show that what happened to Risinghill is as relevant today, and make people question what is possible in education and most of all what we can all do about it.