It’s the first day of September and across the county schools are welcoming new starters into reception classes and returning pupils from their summer break. While teaching and support staff have successfully confronted numerous challenges of the coronavirus pandemic for the past eighteen months, a century ago teachers faced a very different problem – how to get children back to school at the beginning of the new term.
On 8 October 1894, Thomas Kenward (headteacher 1880–1923) wrote ‘School opened at 9 this morning. Only 9 children in attendance as the hop-picking is not finished’. In agricultural communities such as Woodchurch there were clearly competing priorities, gathering in the harvest invariably trumped sitting in a stuffy classroom copying letters onto a slate or reading aloud in class. There was no noticeable change twenty-four years later when in 1918, with the First World War nearing its end, Mr Kenward’s entry for 16 September noted ‘Re-opened school today with only 4 children. Registers were therefore not marked. All the others are hop-picking’. The school had already closed earlier than planned in July that year ‘as the bigger children are required to work on the land at harvesting and bean cutting’.
One can only imagine the frustration of having a virtually empty school but resigned to the fact that the children were doing important work, and few would be at their desks until the autumn crops were in.
The records for Woodchurch Primary, which provide some fascinating insights into the day-to-day running of the school including a complaint against a teacher accused of drunkenness, are kept at the Kent History and Library Centre in Maidstone (catalogue reference CC/C-E/S/400).
You can read more about going to Woodchurch Primary School in Victorian times in the latest issue of Scuppets & Scutchell, the new local history journal for Woodchurch.
