Rowen House School

Its head, Bryn Purdy, had worked at Summerhill and had also been invited to join Wills in his Bromley project. After this, he applied its principles in an inner city "special" school set up by the Local Education Authority for day pupils. As Shotton was later to write What unites the Little Commonwealth . . . and Rowen House . . . is the importance attached to personal autonomy, the aversion to systems of reward and punishment, hostility to coercive pedagogy and the fundamental and central belief in [shared responsibility]. However, in the 1970s, control of state education became more centralised, with more emphasis on what could be termed behaviourist principles. Accordingly, it became…

Accordingly, Bryn Purdy and his wife bought a former orphanage in Belper to develop as an independent school to which various local authorities might refer children, specifically adolescent girls, who were finding it impossible to progress in more conventional educational settings. Such children may have been subjected to a family background of neglect or violence, and to sustained bullying at school, to which they have reacted in the only way they knew how. As Purdy puts it "a teacher, through his or her headteacher, will bring the child to the attention of an educational psychologist, who may engage the help of a social worker. Then, after five years or so, when the child is at the end –…