Parent Testimonials

Chris Fitzgerald, mother of Maximvs
Max didn’t fit into mainstream school well. IQ tests show that he is close to genius and he picks things up very quickly, but the previous school didn’t realize this until I had him privately assessed. Only then was he diagnosed as having dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

I found mainstream schools just didn’t understand him. At ten, he had already had 18 different teachers. His self-esteem just dropped, he was a very unhappy child. From the age of five, he’d increasingly spent time standing in the corridor and being kept in at breaks. Towards the end, he had to endure a whole year of being sent home at lunchtimes - only to have to return for afternoon lessons.

Ritalin meant he wasn’t told off as much, but it left him feeling like a zombie and he couldn’t sleep at night. This was when I knew I had no more choices left. I had to do something – I had to get my child out.

Summerhill has been a door onto a magical place for him. There are no more tears of constant frustration, no more is he made to feel useless or a failure for not getting good grades in spelling or for having messy handwriting.

Those fragile years of negative reinforcement have stopped for good. No one tells him off if he fidgets and, anyway, like all other children at the school, he is free to go outside as much as he wants. He responds much better to rules when they are discussed and drawn up by his peers, rather than by authority figures. He now enjoys going to his chosen lessons.

Summerhill has also helped him to make some really good friends. I think teacher intervention in normal schools means that he simply wouldn’t have made these relationships with his peers elsewhere. If something went wrong before Max would get the blame. Adults need to give kids a bit more respect - kids have an inbuilt sense of what is right and wrong, they don’t always need an adult to make decisions for them.

He has grown up. For example, the way he deals with his frustrations has changed completely. These days, if he gets angry, he calms down much more quickly. Before he would go into a strop for days. He is a much more relaxed and happier child!

Joy Wharton, mother of Silas and Tertius
Summerhill really is a school that meets the needs of the individual child - however diverse.

Take my sons. Both are very bright and they look identical, but there the resemblance ends. Tertius is hyperactive and wasn't an easy kid to fit into the system. Silas was under eight chess champion for Kent and likes order. He is quite sensitive.

We sent Tertius to Summerhill because, even if he made it through the system to the end of primary, he would never have coped with a large secondary. Kent is a selective county, and, whilst Tertius was bright enough for grammar school, he would not have found it easy to conform to imposed discipline.

Silas, on the other hand, had had an idyllic primary education, but was about to go into year six - SATs and 11 plus. He would have coped with this, but I knew the pressure would be on. He has a strong sense of justice and he would have seen his friends getting into trouble, which would have upset him. He chose to follow Tertius to Summerhill.

Acquaintances ask me if I am concerned about the boys ‘missing out’ on an education at Summerhill. I feel an EDUCATION is precisely what my sons are benefiting from, rather than the narrow academic training force-fed in classrooms across the country.

The government wants pupils to achieve on six key skills - communication, application of number, IT, working with others, problem solving and improving own learning and performance. I think Summerhill does the last three far better than the state system and the first three at least as well.

Silas surprised me by taking to boarding like a duck to water. Summerhill has given him more confidence, he doesn't get thrown so easily and he has learnt to deal with conflict, without being scared or upset. It is the structure that Silas loves most about Summerhill. He loves rules. He delights in being in an environment where the rules make sense, where they are owned by the community, and where he gets to enforce them as much (if not more) than the grown-ups.

Tertius is a changed child. He has much greater consideration and respect for the needs of others, takes responsibility for his own actions, and is calmer in his approach to life.
He is less argumentative and confrontational. He realises that there is a time and place to stand one's ground, and a time and place to compromise. He has always been very independent but he's safer these days.

The bottom line is that my sons are happy at school, and, by that, I mean 'happy', as opposed to 'not unhappy'.

My attitude is that you can take GCSEs at any time in your life, but you only get one shot at a happy childhood - there are no re-sits!

Kate Gard, mother of Julius
I had a little boy who asked, every morning, even before he opened his eyes: ‘Is it a school day?’ and his face would crease up if it was. He didn’t cry, his face would just kind of pucker. He just didn’t want to go in.

Now the boy wants to live at school. He smiles all the time. I have a child who will happily go up to a stranger in a foreign country and ask for a sandwich in a foreign language.
Before, he was quiet, with short, cropped hair and an abhorrence of dirt. Now he has wild hair, he is always filthy and he says what he thinks.

He was an average seven and a half year old boy – no learning difficulties, no problems socialising. He was at this prim little prep school where everyone had to sit in rows, under control, and behave. He wasn’t doing particularly well, but he could have survived, he could have gone through the system. But he wasn’t happy and ‘not happy’ wasn’t good enough for me. By sending him to Summerhill, I feel I have given him a childhood.

Max Hotopf, father of William, Orlando, Daisy, India and Phoebe

Two of our five children just did not respond well to mainstream schools. One day we just sat back and asked ourselves whether we were prepared to go on, for years and years, forcing them to get up and go into a place they did not like.

India and Orlando both thrived at Summerhill and we felt that we should offer it to our other children – Daisy and William – both of whom were apparently doing well in mainstream education.
Now all four of them, plus five year old Phoebe are at Summerhill.

What we found extraordinary was that bullying, teasing and social exclusion, something we had encountered in all the other schools our children attended, is almost entirely absent at Summerhill.
Yes, children have arguments and, occasionally, fights. But these are dealt with either within the group or through the meetings. Without authority figure intervention and within the framework of the Summerhill, children learn to deal with personal clashes extraordinarily well.

Our children have become a great deal more mature and responsible since they’ve been at Summerhill. They are also more laid back – when they are at home they get on much better and they aren’t constantly asking us to do things, they just go out and play. Sibling rivalry, which used to be a real headache, has all but vanished. They are just much nicer to be with!

In a year, Orlando went from a child who would not let you out of his sight in a small town to a boy who was happy to go 100 miles on a train by himself and even change trains, alone, in a mainline station.
Daisy, who often struggled within girly cliques has made much deeper friendships and is capable of standing up for herself in a completely new way.

For some of them, homesickness was a problem at first, but they now simply see Summerhill as their second home and second family. In fact, they are eager to get back there at the end of the holidays.

They have a strong sense of the importance of democracy and great pride in the fact that they are attend a democratic school where they make the rules. It is ironic, given that they attend a school with no school uniforms, that they proudly wear T-shirts and hoodies imprinted with the Summerhill logo all holiday!