‘I grew up in the Seventies, when men were men’
Harry-Wallop meets the state school head who says skinning rabbits is as vital as a classroom lesson
‘Iprefer headmaster to headteacher. It’s old school,” says Mike Fairclough, when I ask him his job title. But there’s nothing old school about Mr Fairclough.
For starters, he looks more like a model who’s got lost on the way back from a Game of Thrones- themed fashion shoot. A mud-spattered hunk, he has shoulder-length blond hair and a crisp white shirt slashed to the top of his Harris tweed waistcoat. This he has teamed with a pair of vintage 1970s jeans, black Hunter wellies and the most outrageously exuberant knee-length fur coat. “It’s real bear fur,” he says.
The look is complemented by piercing blue eyes and lashings of Gucci Pour Homme (he keeps a bottle on the dashboard of his Land Rover Defender). When I tease him about the lothario look, the 43-yearold says: “I grew up in the Seventies, when men were real men.”
But it’s not just the Heathcliff image that makes Fairclough stand out. It’s the school he runs. West Rise Junior is a small state primary school in Eastbourne that believes children will learn just as much blasting shotguns, skinning a rabbit or making a campfire as in a PSHE lesson.
“The Secretary of State is very keen on character-building,” he says. “Well, this is what we are doing – you are not going to build character by sitting behind a desk all day writing. Children need to be challenged mentally and physically in an expansive way.”
He’s chatting to me in his Land Rover as we rattle across the Marsh: 120 acres of floodplain next to the school, leased from the council for £1,000 a year. Among the bulrushes and soggy fields are water buffalo, turkeys, a goat, sheep and beehives.
On the morning I visit, forest school is in action, with some very muddy nine and 10-year-olds roasting apples on a campfire, whittling wood with hunting knives to make arrows, making their own bows and firing them at a target.
You might think the health and safety brigade would be having a fit. Fairclough is not just unwrapping the cotton wool from around his children, he’s throwing it with glee on to the campfire. But no. West Rise was recently named Times Educational
Supplement primary school of the year, and last week Dame Judith Hackitt, chairman of the Health & Safety Executive, said more school headteachers should follow Fairclough’s example.
“We do lessons about gun dogs, we do target shooting with rifles, we do ferreting – not actually killing rabbits – and all are done in a really responsible way,” Fairclough stresses. He also wants to make clear that for all the Bear Grylls-style activities, the children do plenty of classwork too. Ofsted, which rates the school as “good”, says the curriculum is “outstandingly rich”.
“The school is a mixture of oldfashioned formality and a more relaxed approach,” Fairclough says. “There’s a uniform and children have to put their hands up in class and they stand in line. I’m not going to let a child hold a shotgun if they can’t stand in line. We have a zero tolerance approach to swearing and fighting. Any of that and they are excluded. And we haven’t excluded anyone for three years.”
West Rise is next to a council estate, which helps to explain its success, says Fairclough. “The parents are completely behind it. The reaction I get most is: ‘I wish I could have been to a school like this’. We don’t have any fussy, middle-class parents.”
The kids too appear very happy. Harvey, nine, who makes me a cup of coffee on the campfire, says proudly: “We’re the best school in England, you know.”
Fairclough, a father of three who recently remarried after his first wife died of a brain tumour five years ago, says his vision for the school has its roots in his art-school days. “It all started with Room 13,” he says, referring to an idea that has taken hold in schools around the world. Led by an artist in residence, children have full autonomy to create what they want. It is, as Fairclough admits, a “hippy” idea. But then again, he is the sort of man who says “cosmic” when you ask if he’s OK.
And the Marsh is not just about teaching resilience or how to start a fire. It is situated on an ancient Bronze Age settlement, and the school’s teachers use it to teach maths, science and ancient history. They have even started to build a Bronze Age village, with a roundhouse coming out of the lake. The children did the thatching. If money and hassle were no object, Fairclough would like to dig up part of the Marsh to recreate the trenches of the Somme. “And I’d bloody love to get some tanks out here!”
His eyes light up at the thought of driving a Crusader with a Year 5 pupil in charge of the machine-gun turret. Fairclough really is a little boy with a dressing-up box. But he’s having a ball, and, most importantly, so are the children.
‘We don’t have any fussy middleclass parents here’