ATL

Farming for confidence

Children's author Michael Morpurgo talks about the benefits of Farms for City Children, the charity he and his wife set up more than 30 years ago

Thinking back, it came upon me quite suddenly, and the more I thought about it, the more I felt it to be true. Teaching a Year 6 class in a rural primary school in Kent, I felt that at best only half of the children were benefiting from their education and were on the road to fulfilling their potential. I knew as their teacher, that I was, with their parents, enabling them to get the best out of their time at school.

But the other half were failing. Their parents were failing them too and I was failing them. These were the children who came from homes where there were no books, where people didn't talk much, where television and materialism ruled. The few hours we had with them at school were, I was sure, having very little positive effect. These children were on a road to nowhere, and most of them were beginning to know it already, beginning to resent school, beginning to give up.

With Clare, my wife, who was also a teacher, we began to try to work out how this situation might be changed. We thought we knew a way forward, but to be sure, we did our research. Wherever we asked in university departments of education, the response seemed to support the notion we were working on.

What all children needed most was to feel needed, and this had to happen young. They had to feel that their contribution was important, that they mattered. Self-worth was the key. Once children felt good about themselves and that their contribution was valued, then maybe, maybe, things could change.

So rather idealistically, naively, we moved from Kent to Devon. With money left to Clare by her father Allen Lane, who began Penguin Books, we bought a farm and a large Victorian manor house, and set up a charity. A year or so later the first children came, from Chivenor Primary School in Birmingham, led by their teacher, Joy Palmer.

ith her and her team and the neighbouring farmers, the Ward family, we pioneered a programme of work designed to extend children in every way possible out on the farm; physically, mentally, emotionally, intellectually. They would become the farmers, working alongside their teachers, the Ward family and us to be involved in every aspect of the farm, within the bounds of safety.

A class of Year 5 and 6 pupils, they had come for a week of their school term and, like 75,000 children who have followed to the three Farms for City Children, they did a full working week, whatever the season and the weather - milking, feeding sheep, moving them, lambing them, feeding pigs, hens, geese, ducks, turkeys, mucking the animals out, bedding them down, caring for them.

They dig potatoes, plant trees, pick blackberries and apples, make apple juice. They fetch hay and straw, mend lanes, make bonfires of hedge-trimmings and clear the river banks of rubbish. It is hard work, real work, and they know it is essential and important, that it matters to the animals, to the farm, that it simply matters. They matter.

With that new confidence, attitudes and work habits change and relationships with friends and teachers can be cemented. The children gain awareness of their place in the world, of the ecology of the countryside, of where their food comes from, of the need to look after the environment because they know it belongs to them now; it is theirs to care for.

Who knows the effect this may have on them in the long term? Ted Hughes once said many of these children would treasure this time for the rest of their lives, that as grandparents they will pass on the stories of their time in the countryside, down on the farm. Passing it on is what education can and must do; it's all that education can do.

For more information about Farms for City Children, visit www.farmsforcitychildren.org. Michael Morpurgo's latest book This morning I met a whale is available from bookshops.

Image (c) Phil Wriggleworth