The best of luck to our new sixth form college

However, there’s one venture that I have to wish well, and that’s the new sixth form college, trendily logoed-up as S6C.

For years, young people have been voting with their feet and commuting out of Wiltshire in search of post-16 opportunities, while our education department wasted time and money trying to force through an unworkable academy scheme in Laverstock.

When it actually got round to asking teenagers what they wanted, the answer was that if you couldn’t get in to the grammar school sixth forms, the local options couldn’t compete with Brockenhurst, Burgate or Totton, or with high-achieving Peter Symonds College in Winchester - spiritual home of disaffected Bishop’s boys in my sons’ schooldays.

I know how those kids felt. I was a disaffected grammar school pupil once.

At 16, I didn’t want to wear a uniform with a grey pleated skirt so long I’d been waiting to ‘grow into it’ since I was 11.

I didn’t want to be forced to run around a freezing cold hockey pitch in baggy black sateen bloomers.

I didn’t want to be a prefect and spend my lunchtimes supervising younger kids when I could have been hanging about in corners with dangerous older boys, and I definitely didn’t want to be told what to do. I knew it all already.

So despite strong parental disapproval I went to the local bog-standard tech, where I got up to all sorts of things I shouldn’t have, but managed to emerge with three decent A-levels, qualifications in shorthand and typing, and a bunch of likeminded mates.

What I found there were some superb teachers who didn’t treat us like children.

At 60, I still remember the inspirational English lessons of Mr Bragg and Mr McMahon.

That’s the secret of success for any educational establishment – the quality of teaching.

Without it, it doesn’t matter how many computer suites you’ve got, or how swish your buildings are.

I recall my older son telling me how he sat in a dilapidated prefab at Bishop’s in the days before the rebuild, with rain dripping through the roof, and a bucket on the desk.

When he complained that water was splashing his work, the teacher told him: “Well, move the bucket, boy!” And carried on regardless.

That’s the spirit.

anneriddle36@gmail.com

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