Hands up who wants to be in Britain’s smallest school!
Lunch from the local pub, playtime on the village green — no wonder Milburn Primary’s loved by its six pupils (just don’t expect too many sheep in the Nativity play)
OCTOBER might seem a tad early to be planning the annual school nativity play, but teacher hayley Dixon has something of a casting conundrum.
Is she struggling to find roles for all her class, given that there can only be one Mary, three Wise Men, a couple of shepherds and, say, 16 sheep? Is she trying to work out how to manage the parental disappointment when it dawns that little charlie is going to be playing a tree, again?
no, poor Mrs Dixon, the sole class teacher at Milburn Primary School just outside Penrith, cumbria, doesn’t have too many pupils to comfortably tell the christmas Story but too few. For the school has just five full-time pupils on its register.
Today, all five are present and correct. Mrs Dixon has ticked off James, Eboni and Boris — all ten years old — Fletcher, eight, and Oliver, four, on the register. It probably took her as long to take the top off her pen as it did to do roll call, since all it requires is a quick glance.
What if a pupil is late? Sliding in ten minutes after the bell might go unnoticed in a bigger school. here — with only one class, in a single room — it’s going to be glaringly obvious. Luckily, Mrs Dixon hasn’t come up against this one. ‘not one of them has been late at all this term,’ she says proudly.
What if a lurgy strikes? In a typical primary school, it’s not unusual for six pupils to be off on one day in peak sniffle season.
‘We’ve never had that either,’ says executive head teacher nick Page, who is responsible for this school and another bigger one nearby. ‘cumbrian kids are tough.’
The pupil count at this tiny school swells to six on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, when three-year-old Avery joins the nursery section of the school (or rather, becomes the nursery section of the school).
This morning, five little heads shoot up when Mrs Dixon starts to whisper to me about her christmas planning: ‘ I’ve been thinking about it this week, but I haven’t decided whether we will do a nativity or a more generic celebration about holidays.’
James groans. ‘We did that last year,’ he says.
If they do opt for a nativity, where will they find the shepherds? Mrs Dixon is a pragmatic sort. ‘ Well, the children will just have to take more than one part each. And the adults can pitch in.’
Is Milburn Primary the smallest primary school in the country? Well, it certainly seems so. ‘We haven’t heard of a smaller one,’ says Mr Page.
Luckily, given that he might be playing Joseph, herod the Angel Gabriel come December, Mr Page is an accommodating sort. ‘One thing is certain: in this school, no one will be saying “I don’t need a part — I’ll help out with the lighting”. Everyone is needed, front and centre.’ Today, this little gem of a school has agreed to open its doors to us — and what an astonishing place it is.
The blink-and-you’ll-miss-it village of Milburn, which can trace its history to medieval times, lies in the stunningly beautiful Eden Valley, on the edge of the Lake District.
The core of the village was constructed in the 18th century, and it is an architectural marvel, featuring a village green enclosed by houses on all sides.
There is a fortified air to the place. The almost continuous frontage is broken only by lanes which lead to the farms behind. Two roads fork around the grass and lead up to the
pièce de résistance — the dinkiest little school house you can imagine.
There is no playground and no fences. The children are out, cartwheeling and footballing on the actual green. As I drive up, they all leap to stand in a line, which is the drill when they see a car.
Sometimes Mrs Dixon rings her bell (a hand-held brass one, if you please) to remind them of the rules.
Later, I witness them do the same with a tractor, trundling along with a load of hay bales. The driver, who clearly knows them all, is rewarded with waves. ‘ There is no through traffic,’ explains Mrs Dixon, who has been standing watching, arms crossed. ‘ The vehicles coming up tend to be the same ones. It’s safe.’
Don’t health- and- safety rules require schools to be fenced in these days? ‘Oh we have to have all the risk assessments,’ says Mr Page. ‘ But, thankfully, common sense has prevailed. You can’t fence a school like this off from the community. It the community.’
Yet only five families in this village — population 117 — are directly associated with the school (Fletcher and Eboni, the only girl, are siblings). Milburn is an old people’s village, and getting older. The Victorian building ( bearing the apt sign Milburn School, Small and Friendly) was built in 1851, after a pupil set fire to the original thatched one.
THEN, the school was a place that met the needs of its community, with boys given time off lessons to help with sheep-shearing. In modern times, the school has had a chequered history. In 2008, it had 37 pupils, but numbers dropped to just three in 2014, following a population dip.
A disastrous Ofsted assessment that year, when the school was put into special measures, busted the myth that smaller is always better (interestingly, the report highlighted that parents were starting to withdraw children because of concerns over the teaching).
The end seemed to beckon. But the last Ofsted report has declared it a good school. now the roll call has settled at five full-time pupils and one part-time nursery one — and a brand new staff.
Mr Page, who previously worked in an inner- city primary in Brixton (‘very different,’ he concedes), has been in his post since the summer. Mrs Dixon joined the school in September. She is helped by a parttime teaching assistant, Jess White, while on the reception desk is rachel Daynes, who does the school’s admin. her role takes one day a week.
At lunchtime, we adults officially outnumber the children when the cheery dinner lady Debbie (who turns out to be James’s mum and a school governor) arrives, bearing food.
The school dinners are made by the chef of the local pub. (‘he doesn’t make them in the pub, it’s all done at another primary school, but they taste like home-made pub food,’ clarifies Mrs Dixon.) Today’s lunch is homemade sausage rolls and mash, with vegetables. ‘They are better than any school dinners I’ve known before,’ says Mr Page.
CLEARLY, there is a very different feel to this school. It has a home-spun quality. Mrs Dixon’s biggest challenge is that she teaches all the pupils in the same room (there are only two rooms; the main classroom and the early years ‘centre’, which Avery pretty much gets to himself).
‘It means you have to be on top of the entire school curriculum, whereas in my previous school I would teach a class where all the pupils were at the same stage,’ Mrs Dixon says.
‘But the advantage is because there are only five of them, they get a lot of one- on- one tuition. I know these children inside out. You just can’t have that sort of knowledge with a class of 30.’
As classrooms go, this one is quiet, and one striking fact, immediately obvious, is that the older kids instinctively lean over to help the younger ones. Mr Page nods. ‘Funnily enough, it’s something that is formally put in place in other schools — a buddy system which links children of different ages. here, we don’t have to engineer that.’
Today, the children are learning about habitats and biomes, and making little models of animals. The younger children are busy with Plasticine. The older ones are creating Arctic landscapes.
On the wall, the vast outside world is just a click away — via an interactive board linked to a laptop. ‘Every child here has access to the same resources that those at bigger schools have,’ says Mr Page. he’s not kidding. There are virtual reality goggles for every pupil and more laptops in this school than there are children.
There is no assembly hall — ‘although it’s important that we have assembly, so once a week we do it, in the corner there,’ says Mr Page.
There is also no traditional sports day because, to put it bluntly, there aren’t enough legs for a fair race. ‘Instead we have a community sports day, where we invite the village.’
Our conversations keep coming back to the community. Without it, it’s clear this school would have died. ‘ We need their support,’ says Mr Page. ‘In schools I’ve worked in previously, a sponsored walk might have raised £3,000. here, there is no hope of that, but the local people have been tremendous.
‘We put on lunches where they come and the children serve them.
Everyone says that they love to see the children playing outside.’
The mood is more relaxed than in most schools. There are specific breaktimes and lunchtimes, but there is no electric bell (at the end of the day the children take turns to pull the chain on the big manual one themselves), so things don’t feel as regimented. ‘And we can take a bit longer at break one day, if we like,’ says Mrs Dixon. ‘Or vice versa. If the kids are busy doing something, we can have break late. Sometimes they are engrossed, and they want to keep going.’
In a school this size, school trips can be more ad hoc. ‘We took them all to the Westmorland Show the other day,’ says Mrs Dixon. ‘If we want to go sailing, we can.’
There is an outdoors classroom in the woods nearby and, if it’s a nice day, they can pick up their books and go there. ‘We will sometimes come outside and read a book under the tree, too,’ she says.
Don’t get the impression that anything goes here, though. A lot is expected of these children. They are polite and respectful, but any high jinks (yes, we are looking at you, Oliver) are quickly dealt with.
‘You have to be careful with that,’ concedes Mr Page. ‘A teacher here will see all the little things, and the temptation is to come down too hard. You don’t want that either.’
To watch them line up at Mrs Dixon’s command seems a little excessive (given there are only five of them, is it worth it?), but it’s a fundamental. ‘They have to line up, because it instils discipline, and they will have to do it at their next school,’ says Mr Page.
Mr Page’s other school is nearby Beaconside Primary School, which has 451 pupils. Once a week the pupils travel to Beaconside in a minibus, where they take part in lessons that would be difficult to arrange at Milburn.
They do music, PE and French. Mixing with larger peer groups here is beneficial, ‘but they like to come back here, too,’ says Mr Page. It sounds like having the best of both worlds. In fact, if Milburn seems to be the perfect primary school, then it is precisely because it has achieved the impossible. It’s like a high-tech version of the school out of Little House On The Prairie.
It’s also a one-off. The Church of England, which oversees 70 per cent of schools with fewer than 110 pupils, warned earlier this year that it may have to close many of them because of problems with funding, teacher supply and maintenance.
So far, Milburn is not on any hit list, but its future will depend on boosting those pupil numbers, particularly since the eldest will be moving on soon. There is some (half) joking today about the school needing a family with five children to move into the village.
‘Seriously, though, we have been giving a lot of thought to what the ideal size would be,’ says Mr Page. ‘A school like Milburn couldn’t get too big without you losing the thing that makes it special. My view is that if we had two pupils in each year group, it would be perfect.’
It would, if for no other reason than in the three-legged race at that annual community sports day, each child would have a partner.
And 14 children would give you Mary, Joseph et al, and a whole flock of sweet little shepherds.
One child’s name has been changed, at the parents’ request.