Phyllis Wallbank
Leading British proponent of the Montessori teaching method
PHYLLIS WALLBANK, who has died aged 101, was a close friend of the Italian educationalist Maria Montessori; she went on to found her own all-age Montessori school in London in 1948, thus helping to launch the movement in Britain.
Initially the school was tiny, operating from the sitting room of the rectory where Phyllis and her husband, the Rev Newell Wallbank, resided. It was named The Gatehouse, and at first there were just eight pupils. There was also nearly no money as the Wallbanks subsisted on the tiny salary (about £150) that Newell received as curate of St Bartholomew-the-great church in Smithfield.
Phyllis Wallbank deployed her ingenuity to get what she needed, buying second-hand Montessori materials and a set of bathroom stools that – stripped of their cork and repainted – did for the classroom. Every evening the teaching materials were stored and the room was reclaimed by the household.
By the early 1960s the growing school occupied the cloister of the church. When pupils numbered around 80 it moved again, to Dallington Street in Clerkenwell, before finally settling in Bethnal Green.
Phyllis Wallbank’s own time at Gatehouse School lasted for over 30 years, and involved several properties purchased to further the Montessori vision of child-centred education.
Central was the idea that children thrive in nature and with order and structure. To this end a small house in Elgin in Scotland served as a retreat for children who seldom (if ever) left the city. For some years Phyllis Wallbank also ran a small Montessori boarding school, Gateway School in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, which she supervised at weekends. Its day-to-day business eventually passed to the acting headteacher.
Dark-haired in her youth, with a broad smile that revealed an endearing gap in her teeth, Phyllis Wallbank possessed exceptional communication skills and great determination. She was also made of stern stuff, running an East End rest shelter during the Blitz and being prepared to face disapproval from those who considered a lesson conducted in St Bartholomew’s graveyard a step too far.
There was even a trip to India, during which she and the pupils travelled third class by train and visited Delhi, Bombay and Agra. Today there are more than 30 accredited Montessori schools across the UK, and around 20,000 worldwide.
Born in London on September 1 1918, the youngest of three children, Phyllis Gardner belonged to a family which valued learning and application. Her father was an engineer with the London Telephone Company while her mother ran the household; her paternal grandfather was a headmaster who provided hot meals to poorer pupils and also played a role in establishing London’s first technical college.
Early on Phyllis showed intellectual promise, winning a scholarship to the fee-paying Lady Margaret’s School in Fulham. As the exam papers were lost in a fire that year, she got in on interviews alone. By the age of 18 she was working in the kindergarten there.
As university was unaffordable she took a job as a child probation officer for Buckinghamshire County Council, studying child psychology in the evenings at London University. A friendship with the psychoanalyst Kate Friedlander led Phyllis to attend a talk by Maria Montessori in London.
By the mid-1940s she had completed the Montessori course, worked as an examiner for Maria Montessori in France, Italy, Holland and Austria and started her own family, having married Newell Wallbank in 1942.
Phyllis Wallbank was appointed MBE in 1996, and the same year was awarded the Benemerenti Medal by Pope John Paul II.
Newell Wallbank died in 1996, and Phyllis is survived by their daughter and two sons.