Thetford Academy Principal Michael Fordham has been reflecting on the legacy of Henry Morris, the pioneering education officer whose vision for community schools still resonates today.
Over the summer holiday, I try to catch up on some reading and this year I have been revisiting the life of Henry Morris. His is a name that is probably not familiar to most people, but he was someone who significantly shaped our education system in the mid twentieth century.
Morris was the Chief Education Officer for Cambridgeshire, and when he took on the role the educational climate in the county was bleak. Outside the city of Cambridge, there was very little in the way of school provision, at least above the primary school level. He made it his mission to expand that provision, and out of this were born the Village Colleges that still exist across the county today.
At the heart of his philosophy was the belief that schools are community resources. He famously said he wanted to raise the school leaving age to 90! For Morris, schools provide not just for children (as important as that role is), but for the whole community, and the village colleges when they were established had very strong community education provisions, many of which continue to this day. The idea of the community school or community college became so popular that other counties began to establish institutions on a similar model, and if you went to school in the late twentieth century there is a reasonably high chance that your school name had the word community in it – I know mine in Cornwall did.
The educational world we live in now is quite different even from 25 years ago, and I do wonder if the emphasis on schools as a community resource has somewhat diminished. Many adult education programmes have disappeared from schools, and there is little in the way of funding for this in the current financial context. But I increasingly think we need to come back to Morris’s vision for community education, and, given changes in life expectancy since his time, perhaps we should be talking about raising the leaving age to 100.
Michael Fordham – Principal, Thetford Academy
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