A Rural Practitioner..

Following consent, this short interview was carried out in Spring 2010. After some background, it recalls some of the reasons for the respondent’s thinking now. This includes personal experiences and a specific rural context of her life and work (as a playgroup leader)


The method is one of simply listening to the recording, noting down some content (not verbatim) and selectively seeking points for extension.

There’s many important points here made in an ordered way; these include an outline (curriculum) philosophy about ‘going with’ the child’s desires, the playgroup’s future, some thoughts about what the future might look like for the respondent and the context of services in a rural farming environment and herself. It is this final part which warrants some further analysis.

We touch here one small but significant aspect of 21st century. The local agricultural community is basically one of a set of small increasingly hard-pressed rural land-based enterprises. Expansion in what is a National Park is accounted as being very constrained and planning permission appears to be a very long and (overly) complex process. This means, for the speaker, that the area reflects a trend in the farming industry to leave the vocation and move away. Also, a point about the cost of housing may be being made.

From a playgroup point-of-view, this means a decline in the number of young children in the community who may want to avail themselves of her (and a colleague’s) services on offer to children and their families.

This situation is spoken of, naturally, as a regret; in response to a question about the provision’s future

We’ll struggle..sad as it is, the playgroup will die away… Young families cannot afford to live [here]…you’re not allowed to extend because of the Peak Park [regulations]…no young children coming in

A prognosis made even more uncertain by the pending general election.

This may line up quite nicely with some thoughts by Mervyn Benford of the National Association of Small Schools (BBC 2011). The main point made is that authorities might not ‘understand’ what small rural schools do for their communities and that a plain cost per pupil is too simplistic a formula; the equation probably includes transport, the relative performance of the youngsters and the “real way that learning takes place in your life and my life, at home and in everyday work”


BBC (2011) Farming Today sourced at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zlhhd#synopsis accessed 22nd March

More News..

This site has been around a bit now (three years, almost to the day) and to be honest it's taking some time to get off the ground! This has been mainly about difficult it has been to find time to seriously address our vision together but I think we may well have solved that one and Val is, as we speak, preparing a planning/scoping document...the process moves on :-).