Shortly before the outbreak of war, families had begun to discuss the possibility of starting a school for children aged four to seven, (the Infant School age group). Soon after the reopening in 1946, the subject was brought up again and the Biologists were consulted. It was found that the Centre management was willing to pay half the salary of a qualified school teacher to direct the school in the mornings on condition that she acted as a member of the Centre staff in the afternoon, making the "instruments of health" available to all the children and not only to those on the school roll. It was agreed that the school should use the Centre building rent free during the mornings when it was otherwise unoccupied.

The school committee: parents deciding how to spend their own money

There were several families with a child rising five whom they would shortly be legally bound to send to a school of some sort, and they were impatient to get the Centre school started. At the first meeting of these parents and other interested families, it was agreed that the responsibility for the overall direction of the school should be taken by a committee consisting of both parents of all the children attending the school. This committee should have a secretary and treasurer elected to serve for two years; the meetings should be chaired by members of the committee in rotation.

At one meeting, the question of fees was discussed. The problem they found difficult to solve was whether dues should be paid per child or per family. Argument continued for an hour or more. Why should a family with only one child pay the same as a family that might be sending three children to the school at the same time? No vote was called because the committee was conducted on the Quaker system where decisions are taken only when all present agree. Then a mother with an only child spoke, "Just as we parents need and are able to make friends in the Centre, so do our children. Mr and Mrs X have six children. It's not so important for their younger ones to have the school because they have each other to learn from. We have only one and he needs friends much more than theirs do. So we are quite ready to pay as much as Mr and Mrs X. And anyway, they have more expenses with their six than we have with our one. Our school is going to be a family school just as the Centre is a family club…It's plain that we should have a family subscription just as we have a Centre membership." There was unanimous agreement. It was decided that each family should pay five shillings and six pence weekly.

At another meeting it was decided that children of three and a half or over attending the Centre nursery whose parents and the nursery school supervisor agreed were ready for the next stage should be admitted to the school, and that the children of new member-families aged three and a half or over should be eligible only after a three-months attendance in the nursery.

What kind of school did these families want? Probably many were unable to say in any detail but it seems that they were agreed, as a former member of the school committee has recently recalled, that they wanted a school that 'continued the nurseries'. They had been impressed by how capable, confident and happy their children had become since attending the Centre nurseries. They had watched the children learning through observation of the spontaneous inventions of others and trying out their own ideas whenever the desire and the opportunity coincided. They had seen how assiduously a child will practise a skill it is keen to master and how quickly it learns, when it is free to learn when and how it will. They were perhaps less inclined to worry about their children being left behind in the educational rat race than parents are today, and many of them were aware that all-round physical, mental and emotional development is more important than prowess in the three 'R's. They knew that, if these five year olds went to the state Infant School, it would be around four in the afternoon before they could get to the Centre, and feared that the children, tired after the long day in strange and bewildering - and perhaps frustrating - circumstances, would be unable to make effective use of the facilities for the all-round self-education that were to be found in the Centre building. They wanted their children to be able to continue to learn at their own pace, and for learning to be anxiety-free for as long as possible. Some, knowing how dominant the teacher is in the classroom, feared that dislike or fear of her or fear of failing to come up to her expectations might kill their children's appetite for book-learning.

Eventually just the right teacher for the Centre school was found, a gifted, sensitive and imaginative young woman. She made it possible for each child to work individually, giving them just the right amount of assistance, at the right moment. Elsie Purser noted that, 'Elizabeth [Neave] did not talk to the children much, so the children had to come to her'.

The centre school .. runs concurrently with centre life, in the open building where everyone can see - a family affair

The first hour of every morning was spent by the children playing out of doors or on the covered playground with such things as small bicycles, scooters, roller skates, wood, saws, hammers and nails, sand and water and other materials for construction. Then they moved upstairs to one end of the Long Room. They put out chairs and tables and the trolleys of equipment. This was similar to that used in a modern well-equipped Infant School but included Montessori apparatus. The method of learning reading and writing developed by Marion Cranitch in her Infant School in Goole was used: the children were encouraged to make books of their own; they drew pictures; the teacher added words or phrases as instructed by the child, and, finally, 'stories' were written by the children round the drawings and the child could read what he had written. Each child had a large book of plain paper for this work.

A Bedford station wagon driven by a member who was a retired bus driver was used to collect some of the children who lived in the furthest parts of the 'District' or whose mothers had a small baby, or had to take other children to school in the opposite direction. The van also took them home at midday. The children usually returned at 2 pm with their mothers. In the afternoons, the children could use the learners' pool under supervision and the gymnasium or they could continue doing what they had been doing in the morning in the Long Room, reading, writing, painting, drawing, modelling, and such like. Often there were mothers available who would read stories or play the piano for 'dancing'. At 4 pm. members' children attending other schools would begin to come in, extending the age group upwards, and all through the afternoon, mothers and a few fathers and adolescents would be using the Centre - active in their own way. The school was in the community, not shut away in an artificial world of its own.

The school continued to flourish until the final closure of the Centre, when it contained about 60 pupils. After the closure, some of the parents carried on the school in a Conservative Club hall, but because of the inadequacy of the premises and because they could not afford a trained teacher, it became a school for the under-fives, classified later as a Pre-school Playgroup, and only came to an end in 1975. It was a Centre member, Mrs Gibson, who had been employed to look after the equipment and clean the premises when the school was in the Centre, who acted as the Supervisor of the playgroup for the whole 25 years."

(Taken from "Being Me and Also Us" by Alison Stallibrass.) see publications