La Sainte Union 1

After I left Perrott Hill, I returned to Southampton. That city is one that I have been coming back to for a long time: from boarding school, university, Perrott Hill and then teacher training college.

In the Autumn of 1986 I started my one-year Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) at La Sainte Union College of Higher Education (LSU). My room in a rather grotty Victorian house on Archers Road was not luxurious, but LSU itself was okay. 

It was a Catholic foundation, so there were still a few nuns wandering about the place. All of the buildings have now been either demolished or repurposed, as LSU was closed down in 1997.

 In some ways it was fun to pretend to be a student once again. Most of the LSU students were two or three years younger than I was and no one else on the PGCE had actually done four years of teaching. In some ways this was a big advantage, as I could compare and contrast what I learned on my PGCE course with my experiences at Perrott Hill. Of course, a rural prep school in Somerset is perhaps not the best yardstick to measure all modern educational practices and theories, but maybe it was a lot better than nothing.

 At Perrott Hill I had started reading Roald Dahl’s writing and I was delighted to find that many of my students were also ardent Dahl fans. Young Master Frampton really was not interested in reading, according to his mother. A copy of Danny the Champion of the World (or was it Fantastic Mr Fox?) soon made her ginger-haired son a keen reader. In fact, Mrs Frampton gave me a rather lovely china plate with pictures of pheasants on it when I left Perrott Hill.

Imagine my disgust and horror when one of the lecturers at LSU started slagging off my hero, Roald Dahl, moaning about his cruelty (yes, his stories can be a bit nasty – rather like Grimm’s fairy tales) and his other literary shortcomings.

What a load of trash! Dahl has done more to encourage children's reading (and literacy in general) than all of the lecturers who have ever lived. So I said so. What a tactful chap I was in those days! 

On another occasion, the same lecturer was complaining that many young teachers (and PGCE students) had appalling handwriting. I have always been rather proud of my handwriting and I have been quite interested in calligraphy. As quick as a flash, I produced a letter that I had been writing and asked, “Well, what about this?” Rather grudgingly, the lecturer had to backtrack. And yes, I still have the plate with the pheasants on the wall of our kitchen in Daveri.