Families

I said last night that I would try to update on some of the key ideas which we came up with yesterday when trying to plan how our school will operate

I suppose the main part, which links with the "Space Rules", was the idea of families being at the core of what we will be trying to do. We had a fairly traumatic experience when one of the children said that they wanted the school to replace his family - he'd lost his mum and dad and two sisters (he was being looked after by a neighbour). This seemed to release a pent up reservoir of emotion as children and adults recounted their own personal stories. I was managing to hold myself together until David and Libby told their own story. Despite us having talked a lot about Graham and Kirsty it was only when they put everything into a chronological order and then added their feelings that I realised the depth of their loss. They had been so brave over the last two weeks and I had been so absorbed by my determination to take positive action that I think I had lost sight of what they had been going through.

The process wasn't just cathartic it bound us together in the realisation that we had all undergone a similar experience. The word which people kept using was family.

It was Toby an 11 year old who perhaps summed it up most powerfully: "I want to belong to a family again. I want people to care about me and what I do. I want to care about other people".

As we tried to answer Toby (in fact it was the kids, not the adults who answered) the ideas of setting up our school around families became clearer and clearer. They wanted to create families, made up of kids of different ages, with an adult as a family member - not a leader. It would be the responsibility of everyone in the family to look after everyone else.

It seemed such a powerfully simple idea I couldn't understand why schools hadn't come up with the idea before (maybe they have but I'd never heard it). We didn't get much beyond that core idea but the family group would not grow beyond twelve people.

Most of today has been spent trying to shape this idea and identify the families and their make up. When we met at the end of the afternoon you could almost feel the warmth coming off the kids as at last they belonged - once again - to a family.