Do you dream of setting up your own school, of creating something outside of the conventional, authoritarian education system? This is your chance to ask experts who have been there and done it!
On Wednesday 1st November, you are invited to meet Maz Wilberforce and Tomlin Wilding, who are launching the Hawthorn Small School, a new alternative to mainstream schooling in the New Forest area of Hampshire, UK.
Their mission is to create sustainable progressive, human scale education that nurtures and develops students; facilitating personalised learning as a foundation for lifelong learning. They say:
“Every part of Hawthorn Small School is considered and purposeful. We live our values and guiding principles and use these to make the decisions that govern how we run the school, the organisation, the team and how we show up everyday.”
• Human scale community-structured education;
• Child-centred personalised learning pathways;
• Consent-based and self directed learning;
• Courageous growth through imperfection;
• Consistently compassionate care;
• Educator facilitated collaborative exploration;
• Knowledge in context; connected to the diverse nature of self, human interaction and our world;
• Nurturing lifelong curiosity.
Their offering includes:
HELPod
A flexible, part-time education and learning pod that supplements home education, for students from 5 to 15 years. Open for admission for September 2023.
Primary
Play-based, child-centred introduction to the learning community from 5 to 10 years, using a cross curricular, personalised project based, primary curriculum.
Secondary
Collaborative, consent-based, and professionally facilitated learning from 11 to 16 years, using a cross curricular, personalised project based secondary curriculum.
Hawthorn Small School focuses on providing students with the skills to be successful in their aspirations.
About Our Experts
Prior to setting up the Hawthorn Small School, Maz was the headteacher of the New Forest Small School, a ‘human-scale’ independent school for children aged 3 to 16.
Tomlin is a neurodivergent children’s rights activist, educator and academic researcher in neuropsychology and human development. They are the founder of CalmFamily, which is a collaborative learning organisation that provides a cascade of education to parents and professionals with the aim of changing society through supporting calmer relationships with children.
Join the Webinar
If you would like to ask Maz and Tomlin your questions about how to set up a school, please join us for this live webinar at 7.30pm GMT on Wednesday 1st November. The session will be an open Q&A with a chance to create some next steps if you want to take your school start-up idea further.
You can find out about other webinars in this series on the Progressive Education website.
Hope to see you there!