ABSTRACT
Summerhill school was founded in 1921 by A.S. Neill, whose work on education and child development was of international repute especially in the 1960s and 1970s when it became a ‘transatlantic cult’ (Skidelsky 1969: 15). The school is fee-paying, has charitable status and is now located on the edge of a small town in rural East Anglia. Spatially, the grounds of the school comprise several acres of woodland, some open grassy areas, a large house, and a number of single-storey classroom blocks. The school is divided into five age-related houses: Cottage, San, House, Shack, and Carriage, in ascending order of age. Most staff live in. The School currently describes itself as ‘the oldest child democracy in the world’ (www.summerhillschool.org) and remains unchanged in its ways of selfgovernment since Neill’s time. It is a predominantly residential ‘free’ school, one much inspected and criticised down the years by the relevant government inspectorates in England. In 1999 Her Majesty’s Inspectorate tried to close down the school, lodging a series of objections that the school was forced to resist in court in order to remain open and true to its principles (Stronach in Vaughan 2006). Ending the policy of voluntary attendance at lessons has been the government’s enduring target. The government failed, and since then the school has prospered. Indeed, a recent Social Services Inspection report praised the school’s ‘very high’ levels of pupil satisfaction (CSCI 2005). The current roll (c.90) includes children from age 4 to 16, from countries as varied as the UK, US, Germany, Holland, Japan, Taiwan and Korea. The core of the school is the Meeting, where pupils and staff, on a one person-one vote basis, decide how the school will be run.1
Summerhill was selected as a case study site because we anticipated, on the basis of previous research experience in the school (Stronach et al. 2000; Stronach 2002b), that Summerhill could be seen as being at one end of a continuum, a school generally thought to be less ‘regulated’, where children could choose whether they wished to attend lessons, and where pupils were part of a self-governing community. The original intent to explore ‘touch’ at Summerhill was quickly affected by the recognition of touch per se as a banal issue. The unique characteristics of Summerhill made it obvious that
