"J** went to the Centre school. We wanted a school that continued the nurseries. We had to have lots of meetings to thrash out all sorts of things. The children came home for lunch and we took them again in the afternoon."

"S**** and B**** went to the Centre School. It was a very good school for B**** because he was slow. He was a plodder. When he went to Hollydale School he never finished anything, because he was slow. He still is, but he gets it correct in the end. He is well up in work now. He is a site manager for a builder. A freedom school was very good for him."

"Already before the war, the idea of a Centre school had been mooted by members. Soon after the post-war reopening, forty families, with children rising five, set about organising one. The Director allowed them to use the premises during the mornings and offered to pay half the teacher's salary on condition that she joined the Centre staff during the afternoons. Part-time assistants were recruited from among the parents. After much discussion, it was decided that payment should be the same for each family, irrespective of the number of children. This school continued to flourish until the Centre came to an end in 1950.

These parents, some of whom were far from well-to-do, would rather pay for the schooling of their children than hand them over into the unknown and segregated world of the state Primary School from 9 to 4 every day. They were loathe to deprive them of the use of the Centre during the early afternoons; and they wished to have some say in the kind of teaching they would receive. They wanted their children to learn the skills that require the assistance of a teacher; but they had observed the persistence of the children in learning skills of their own choosing and guessed that children learn best when motivated by their natural curiosity and desire to extend their powers. They wanted their children to have the opportunity to continue to develop the agility and grace, the genuine sociability and the self-reliance that they had begun to acquire in the Centre nurseries.

The nature of the use made of the Centre by the children of the member-families and of their subsequent development was confirmation of the hypothesis that there is an important part of a child's education that he can only get outside the classroom and by participating unselfconsciously in the life of a living and stable community of families of varied ages and walks of life. It also provided information as to the kind of opportunities for activity it is necessary to provide for children living in the almost entirely man-made environment of city and suburb."

(From "Child Development and Education - the contribution of the Peckham Experiment" by Alison Stallibrass. In Nutrition and Health, 1982, Vol 1, pp 45 -52)

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