School of hard knocks
I get back to Hartridge, 31 years after I left, just in time. They’re about to knock it down. They might not even retain the name, which doesn’t have the greatest reputation in its home town of Newport, Monmouthshire. If ever there was a school of hard knocks, it’s Hartridge, a comprehensive which, as everyone admits, is “challenging”. The head thinks the council might prefer to rebrand the new school, due to open in 2009, Llanwern Heights.
Where to begin? In 1968, perhaps, when I went there as a quivering schoolboy. It had a fearsome reputation. It was huge: 2,000 pupils, 40-acre site, three separate buildings – lower, middle and upper school – and a steep grassy bank that you were pushed down shortly after arriving. My back ached for weeks after my tumbling rite of passage.
Its tough reputation came – and still comes – from the fact that it is a “neighbourhood” school. Hartridge’s neighbourbood is the sprawling Ringland estate, also challenging. Its problems have deepened since I lived there. In the 1970s most men were employed at Llanwern steel works – stable jobs, good wages, faith in the future. All that disappeared with the recessions of the 1980s and 90s. The belching factory is now a shadow of its former self. The blast furnaces just across the railway line from the school have been flattened; the land, newly decontaminated, has been set aside for housing. The hope is that the planned 4,000 homes will feed the new school, off setting Ringland’s ageing population. The new parents of the early 60s, who moved into the freshly built estate and school, are now collecting their pensions. I have returned at a moment when one life cycle is giving way to another.
The school still looks the same as it did; the “concrete cancer” that has sealed its fate after a 50-year life is only visible if you look closely. The weather’s the same, too: drizzle. There are fewer pupils than when I was here – only 1,130 now. Hartridge is unpopular with parents in the posher areas that surround Ringland. When I was at school in the early 70s, the council didn’t believe in parental choice. It bussed children in from all parts to ensure what it termed a “balanced intake”. It produced a throbbingly full school and catered for a remarkable range of ability levels. The school taught everything from Oxbridge entrance to forestry. But, asI realised when I went back, in a way it was a trick. The school then was not one school but three – the “grammar stream” (yes, it was even called that), the big bulge of averagely talented kids in the middle, and then the rest. The three streams never met.
I was put in the grammar stream in my second year, and never looked back. I have always said that, despite attending one of the biggest, rowdiest comprehensives in the country, I got a Rolls- Royce education – one-to-one teaching with the head of history in the sixth form for S-level. Could even Eton match that? But were others consigned to a Cortina? The school must have been embarrassed by its non-comprehensiveness: the grammar-stream forms were labelled X, Y and Z; the rest were A, B, C, etc. The inversion of the alphabet fooled no one.
Today, GCSE classes are taught in sets defined by ability and exam expectation, but there is no school within a school. In part that reflects the change in educational thinking, but it’s also a fact of life for Hartridge – with the ending of the balanced-intake system, the school no longer gets enough pupils to produce a grammar stream, or even a grammar rivulet. “We have a very wide-based pyramid,” says deputy head Caroline Townsend. “We have a small number of children who would stand their own anywhere, and we obviously nurture those, and they have as good a chance here as anywhere.”
When I was here Hartridge had a large sixthform. It still does – but most of them are doing sports-related courses. Ten years ago, when former Pontypool rugby player Goff Davies became head, the sixth form numbered only 66; urgent action was needed. “The sixth form wasn’t viable,” he says, “and we had to swell the numbers.” Davies founded a post-16 sports academy which hones youngsters’ sporting skills alongside academic work, usually leading to a sports-management qualification.
On the day I go to Hartridge, they are celebrating a 12-2 win at soccer over Hereford Cathedral School (an unfair contest, surely). Sport was always central to the school, but its new football, golf and cricket academies (rugby will be added next year), which sporty teenagers from all over south-east Wales join at 16, have turned what used to be a religion into a science. Sport is now the beacon that brightens the entire school. “Hartridge’s challenge is the white workingclass male,” says Davies, “and what we’ve tried to do in recent years is to home in on sport. A lot of boys are football- or rugby-mad, especially the tougher ones, and we’ve tried to use sport as a carrot and a stick with them.” Keep up with the coursework and you can play in the cup-winning, choirboy-thrashing soccer team. Slackers will stay on the bench. “This is a socially deprived area and all of a sudden it has this school of sporting excellence,” says Mike Knight, who runs the academies. Now the challenge is to boost the non-sporting part of the sixth form.
I sit in on several lessons, and very impressive they are. The most chaotic of them is a year-seven Welsh class (a modern phenomenon – Welsh was never taught when I was here), but since the 11- year-olds are all beginners and are practising their numbers by playing bingo in Welsh, this is perhaps to be expected. It doesn’t help that I sit right in front of the chart that gives the translations, obscuring the view of at least half the class. Both teacher and pupils are too polite to tell me – in Welsh or English – to move.
Over in middle school, Paul Jenkins is teaching a year-11 physics class. The class is boisterous but controlled – lively in the best sense. “He’s a good teacher,” one of the pupils volunteers. I asked the boy what he means. “He doesn’t try to impose discipline. He carries you with him,” is the thrust of his reply. “Anyone who does try to impose discipline – we’ll take him on.” “School has to offer me something,” says another. “Otherwise I wouldn’t bother coming.” It will irritate the traditionalists, but teaching now has to be a partnership, if it isn’t to be a war.
“I’ve been teaching for 30 years,” says headteacher Davies, “and when I started, you had your books, a board duster and chalk, and you had a dap [a rubber gym shoe]. Obviously those days are long gone and you have to be more skilled now to establish a rapport with the youngsters. The people who have really struggled as members of staff are those who talk down to them and treat them like dirt.”
After a year-10 geography lesson, I talk to four of the pupils about life at Hartridge. “It’s not as bad as people think,” says Grace Phillips. “There are tougher schools in Newport – Duff ryn for a start.” “People here act hard, but they’re not really,” says Georgina Powell, “and the teachers are really good.” “There are some good people but there are screw-arounds as well – people who interrupt lessons and want to cause trouble,” says Kyle Enos, a serious young man who recognises that how he performs at school in the next four years will affect the rest of his life. Listen to the critics – both of Ringland and Hartridge – and you’ll imagine a drink-and drug-fuelled hell, but the reality is more prosaic.
A handful of high-fliers at the top, the screwarounds at the bottom, and a great swathe of pupils in the middle, youngsters who might on a bad day be sucked into anarchy by the screwarounds. The school’s academic performance is grisly by national standards – only 24% of pupils got fi ve A*-to-C grades at GCSE this year – but that paints a misleading picture.
“The vast majority of our youngsters are brilliant,” says Davies, “though getting work out of them is very often difficult because a lot of them lack motivation. Then you have a hard core of youngsters – around 50 – who are difficult. Usually that is down to the family background. There’s no way we’re ever going to compete with the Bassalegs and Caerleons [Newport’s best-performing comprehensives] because of our catchment area. Our number of A-to-Cs [at GCSE] was around 30% a couple of years ago. It dropped this year, but we’ll be back above it next year. You look at that and you think, ‘Flipping heck, that’s not very good,’ but the year we got 30% the information on our youngsters predicted we’d only get 19%, so actually my staff did fantastically well.”
The class that sums up contemporary Hartridge best for me is a year-11 art group – and one pupil in particular, Kerrie Derrick. “The toilets are minging” is her opening sally, a complaint I hear from several other girls. (The boys don’t seem too bothered.) She is also exercised by school food – outrageously expensive, with smaller burgers than from the van parked just beyond the school gates. A more signifi cant dislike is science; she has skipped her two science classes that day. But she enjoys English and dance, and loves art – her sketch book is terrific. She is articulate, thoughtful and a little wayward, characteristics not uncommon among Hartridgeans. She has the talent. The only question is, can it be channelled?
Derrick surprises me by saying she wants to be a social worker, but assistant head Jimmy Stokes tells me later that many of her contemporaries share that ambition: “A lot of kids here want to be social workers. They can see the problems; they’re confronting drugs out there all the time.”
The art class is being taught – if that is the word for so freewheeling an exploration of the subject – by Meriel Davies, who has been at Hartridge for 20 years. “I came here in 1986 to sharpen pencils,” she says. “I didn’t really plan to go back into teaching, but I was here for a week and I was hooked. I love it. Why would you want to teach anywhere else? They tell it as it is here; they tell you the truth.”
Stokes says teaching at Hartridge is never dull. “People say to me, ‘Do you find it difficult teaching in Hartridge?’ I say, ‘It’s like a microwave school – the day is done in two minutes.’ You never get bored. You get a problem and there’s a problem a minute later, and I quite like that because you forget the original problem. The only one you remember is the last one you dealt with at the end of the day.”
He was a pupil here when the school was officially opened in 1964 (six years after lower school first opened its doors), and hopes the name won’t be lost in the rebuild. “I’d like it to stay as Hartridge because I think it’s a strong heritage, and I’m proud of what we’re achieving.” Me too. For half a century it has been fighting against the odds – and mostly winning. Energy, spirit, collective endeavour, truth. Things that league tables don’t measure. Here’s to the next 50 years.
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