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On Charles Booth’s poverty maps of late Victorian London, parts of Camberwell around Wyndham Road are designated as being populated by people of the “lowest class, vicious, semi-criminal”. This was a tough area and, while a local school had been established to serve the community, St Michael and All Angels, education wasn’t always a priority for its poorest inhabitants.
“For a lot of children, the only way that they could afford school clothes and shoes was to go hop-picking in Kent every year – even if it meant bunking off at the start of term,” says radio producer Sara Parker.
Presented by former education secretary Alan Johnson, Parker’s series draws on the archives, including those of St Michael itself, and the memories of those associated with the school as a way to tell a wider social history of education in Britain. It makes for a story rich in telling details, such as when one former pupil remembers having to walk long miles to the ‘receiving office’, the equivalent of a food bank today, in the 1930s. Her legs hurt, but if she cried her sister would give her a slap.
Other stories are no less compelling, such as the destruction of the school by a V-1 rocket in 1944. It took more than 10 years to rebuild and was reopened by Princess Marie Louise, one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters. A costermonger’s son recalls playing hideand-seek on bomb sites in the 1940s and 1950s. “There was a toughness about children then and, when one of his friends got a stake through his leg, he just pulled it out and carried on playing,” says Parker.
In 1974 St Michael merged with another local school to become a large comprehensive, Archbishop Michael Ramsey. The school entered a golden period. Pupils who’d previously have left school at 15 or 16 were encouraged to go on to further education and university.
This is an area of South London where gang violence has been a problem in more recent years, yet there’s still a school on the site, albeit in a new building of glass and brick: the Ark All Saints Academy opened in 2013. Pupils are thriving, despite the area having pockets of social deprivation. “There’s an atmosphere of high expectations, Christian values, respect and discipline,” says Parker, who has visited the school on several occasions. “Pupils are called ‘scholars’, while teachers are ‘Sir’ or ‘Madam’. Somehow, this balance of care and control seems to resonate with the ethos of those early Victorian educators.”