The Founding of St. Michael’s School Ingoldisthorpe

The train from Liverpool Street ploughs slowly out of London towards   Cambridge and beyond, across the flat expanse of fenland to Kings Lynn and the Wash, on past the royal waiting rooms of Wolferton, up the Norfolk coast to Heacham, a few miles from Hunstanton. Other passenger trains arrive at Kings Lynn station from other parts of the UK. The small town, or large village, of Heacham stands on the edge of some of the best agricultural land in the country, its rural life subsidised by the flourishing summer holiday trade and the proximity of the Sandringham Estate. Heacham is blessed with a fine old church which, over the centuries, was enriched by the Neville-Rolfe family who used to occupy Heacham Hall.

It is with the enterprise of its vicar that this article is written. The Reverend Roger P Pott is a man of many parts - Vicar of Heacham, Rector of Ingoldisthorpe and Headmaster of a school of 150 pupils. The school is located at Ingoldisthorpe in a vast Rectory which no incumbent of today could ever hope to maintain as a private house. The main body of the school pupils are boarders residing at The Shooting Lodge, Heacham but the school also accepts a small number of day pupils who travel independently from Kings Lynn and Hunstanton areas.

The nucleus of the staff, since the venture started, has been Mr Pott, his curate and such other members of the local clergy as have the qualifications and inclination to supplement their stipend with this work. To these have been added a couple of graduate schoolmasters and four women teachers, PNEU trained at Ambleside. The school has grown to its present size with classes varying from about 15 pupils for the under 11's to between 22-23 for the more senior pupils.

To start any new school these days is a formidable business. Before the doors were opened in 1946 several 'battles' were fought with the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Works. Private enterprise in education is always suspect - sometimes for good reason - but a few would be Headmasters can have had the favourable background experience which Mr Pott took with him to Heacham.

Early in the career of Mr Roger R Pott he began to combine full-time school mastering with full-time service in the ministry of the Church of  England. In 1935 he was appointed Chaplain to the presiding Bishop in Japan. Among his tasks in Yokohama was the supervision of the English speaking church. This brought Mr Pott in contact with many different nationalities in that cosmopolitan city and in due course he found himself with the additional job as Headmaster of the International School. In this capacity he acquired unusual insight into the needs of children whose education had been complicated by language barriers, and by living abroad. A score of different nationalities were to be found in the school. Candidates were prepared for School Certificate examinations in nine languages. Mr Pott doubled these duties with those of an ordained minister of a missionary church. As will be shown later much of this experience proved invaluable in the very different circumstances in running a school in North West Norfolk.

After being demobilised from the Royal Navy, in which as Chaplain he survived shipwreck more than once, he was appointed vicar of Heacham. Mr Pott followed a long and admirable tradition among English country parsons by taking on the additional responsibility by offering coaching to local boys. His idea was to help those who were slow at learning or whose education had been interrupted by illness or some other cause. He started coaching six boys to begin with and to his amazement word quickly got around that he was taking in pupils for additional educational skills and he became inundated with requests from frenzied parents. He quickly recognised that there was a keen demand locally for a new school.

He adopted a principle that he retained throughout his working life. He did not think that his future lay in teaching subnormal nor maladjusted children. He knew very little about their problems and how he might help them. But what he did recognise was the fact that there was no system in place, anywhere in the country, to offer support and a real education to those children who had, for no fault of their own, slipped behind on the academic road to success. His contempt for the 11+ examination was unbounded. He did not think it was fair.

Since 1946 Mr Pott gave himself the opportunity to test, to his own satisfaction, the validity of the secondary selection tests. His 11+ rejects have included pupils who were plainly destined for University places. In some cases they were pupils who had been held back by illness or by frequent changes of school. Most of them followed a similar pattern of the typical late developer.

And so St. Michael's School Ingoldisthorpe was founded.