School portraits / A June of leavers’ teas at Channing Junior School, Highgate
Leaving Junior School, With One Last Request: More Mud
Channing’s junior head invited her Year 6 leavers to tea to hear what they had loved. The girls, weeks from senior school, arrived with a policy proposal.
In June 2023 the head of Channing Junior School in Highgate, Miss Hamalis, tried something new: Moving Up Tea Parties for the Year 6 girls, so she could hear about their time at the school before they crossed the road to the senior one. She wrote it up on the school’s community site, and I read it the way other people read a spy novel. There were happy memories, including “our charity disco with DJ Bolton on the MUGA”. Then, with weeks to go before secondary school, the girls made their move.
Forest School, they told her, would be even better if it carried on into Year 5 and Year 6.
It is a superb piece of lobbying. They had a captive audience, a tea party in their honour and nothing left to lose. Forest School at Channing runs from Reception to Year 4, in the wooded area at the bottom of the grounds, and these girls had been out of it for two years and were plainly not over it. Miss Hamalis suggested they speak to their form teachers and perhaps have their “Conabor Time in Forest School this half term.” I do not know what Conabor Time is. I want some.
To understand what the leavers were fighting for, read the testimony on the school’s Forest School page. One Year 2 pupil reports: “By the end of Forest School everyone has mud on their face.” Another lists what she has built from wood, rope, mud, sticks and a piece of scrap metal: a water collector, an oven, a table, a fireplace and a shop. A shop. At seven. My husband has been building a garden bench since 2019 and it is still, in all honesty, a pile.
A Year 1 parent on the same page describes the joy of “swapping uniform for waterproofs and wellies”. I have swapped uniform for waterproofs and wellies once, at a festival, and it was not joy so much as weather. And when the Good Schools Guide visited, a parent told its reviewer: “they even climb trees on Hampstead Heath now!” That is the outcome. That is what four years in the woods buys you. Our daughter, who is ten, got to the top of the bunk-bed ladder this morning and asked whether I could drive her the 400 yards to school.
So I took a leaf out of Year 6. I emailed our primary, politely, to ask whether parents could have a session of Forest School, given everything, perhaps on a Friday.
They were lovely about it, and suggested I speak to my form teacher.
Sources
- Channing Connect, Junior School News: Miss Hamalis’ Tea Party, 12 June 2023
- Channing School, Forest School: pupil and parent voices
- Good Schools Guide, Channing Junior School review, publicly reproduced by Channing
Notes from the School Gates is a light-hearted column: home scenes and family characters are invented; schools and public facts are real. About the column