School portraits / Pupil accounts from 2024 and 2025
Year 8 Moved Into Huts. We Tried It at Home.
At King Alfred School, Year 8 spend a week cooking on open fires with no phones. I decided our kitchen could manage the same, minus the huts.
“You can’t control the temperature like a hob, but you get the hang of it.” That is a Year 8 boy at King Alfred School in north London, on cooking over a fire, in the school’s summer 2025 newsletter. His year had spent five days living in huts they built in the school grounds: the Village. No phones, no tablets, no laptops, and the staff sleep in their own encampment outside. He reckoned he had “probably slept better here than I do at home”. I read this out at supper and announced a Village of our own, starting Monday. No huts. We would make do with a hob.
Monday was technology. Seb, thirteen, surrendered his phone like a knight handing over a sword, and at 7.40 was found in the airing cupboard with an iPad from 2017 I had forgotten we owned. I confiscated it, then checked the PTA WhatsApp in case of emergencies. The emergency was a lost recorder. I replied twice.
Tuesday was governance. The Village holds two meetings a day, “one of which is run by the students without staff present.” Ours was in the youngest’s bedroom with the door shut. It lasted four minutes. They voted 3–0 to restore the Wi-Fi. The motion failed because the router lives in my bedroom.
Wednesday was cooking. A girl in the 2024 Village, who made elderflower doughnuts over a fire, came away with a rule: “if someone cooks, then someone else cleans up.” I wrote it on the fridge in green. Our daughter made beans on toast for five, two slices of it recognisably toast. Then we discovered that in our house nobody is someone else. Seb had cooked on Monday, in spirit. The youngest had a verruca. My husband was in the shed, which is the nearest thing we have to a staff encampment.
By Friday I had washed up four nights running. The boy in the hut was right about the sleep, though. I was sleeping better than I do at home, which is quite a result for somebody who was at home.
Sources
- The Village Project 2025, Upper School Newsletter, printed pages 22–23 — King Alfred School
- The Village 2024 — King Alfred School
- The Village Project — King Alfred School
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