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Our School Programmes

Our free school programmes help children to flourish. We offer learning experiences with real-world purpose, supporting wellbeing and bringing to life the big ideas of curriculum subjects. To find out more please sign up below.

The Nature of Home

The Nature of Home was a programme for schools in Harpenden and Luton, inspired by the history of former children’s home Highfield Oval. Pupils explored the meaning of home and belonging and learnt how to navigate new beginnings as they discover the stories of the children who came to live at Highfield Oval. They learnt and experienced how connecting with nature supports wellbeing. As historians, they explored archive materials, films and oral histories. And as artists they developed printing techniques, inspired by Highfield Oval’s printing heritage.

Resources produced to support history and PSHE are now freely available to all local schools here. The Nature of Home was made possible by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

"I can confidently say the whole project is fantastic."
TeacherThe Nature of Home

Of 68 pupils completing our survey about the Nature of Home programme:

said they learnt new ways to improve their wellbeing
0 %
said it helped them to feel empathy for others
0 %
said it made them want to protect nature and the environment
0 %
said it made them more interested in local history
0 %
said it had helped them prepare for change in their own lives
0 %

Resources

Click the icons below to download some of the history and PSHE Nature of Home resources.

Session 1

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Session 2

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Session 3

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Session 4

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Session 5

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Our Partnership with Woodlands Secondary School

We offer tailored work experience programmes and class visits for Woodlands Secondary School, a special needs school in Luton. Woodlands work experience students have made an important contribution to the site, from planting chamomile, lavender and rose beds to supply our botanical remedy workshops, to painting our new apple shed! They also help with the preparation for our Thrive Outside days for fostering families. Class visits create the opportunity for younger students to enjoy nature-based crafts and gardening. 

“After a difficult and uncertain and, for a lot of the time, stuck-indoors year, the placements were a metaphorical and literal breath of fresh air for our people.”
TeacherWoodlands Secondary School

Our Global Home

Our Global Home offers schools the opportunity to learn about daily life, the meaning of home and the natural environment for children in very different parts of the world, directly from the children themselves. In our first Global Home project children in Harpenden Academy and three primary schools in Jinja, Uganda, created a book of art, poetry and reflective writing on the theme of home. The book is a celebration of the diversity and commonality of childhood experiences.

Contact Us

If you’d like to find out more about the opportunities we offer for schools in Harpenden and Luton, please get in touch.

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Wholehearted Childhood CIC is a community interest company registered in England (No. 11632138)

Wholehearted Childhood CIC is a community interest company registered in England (No. 11632138)

Boys' Wood

An open-air classroom at the Sanatorium, 1947

The children’s home contained two woods in its grounds, this one, known as the Boys’ Wood, and the Girls’ Wood, known today as Ambrose Wood. When the home opened in 1913, the chance to play and learn outside was considered by the founders to be essential to the wellbeing of children. Open air classrooms were created here and at the nearby Elmfield Sanatorium, also run by the National Children’s Home, for children with TB.

Memories of the woods

Geoffrey Atkinson, who was cared for as a child at Highfield Oval from 1953, when he was ten years old, remembers playing in the Boys’ Wood.

The Orchard and Food Growing

Planting potatoes, 1953

Food growing and farming on site helped to provide for the children’s home and also offered training for the young people. Most of the green vegetables and soft fruit needed were grown in the grounds. In a good year the orchard produced enough apples to last the winter. Children were taught gardening skills in a teaching garden in the orchard. Children from the children’s home and from the town helped out on the farm in the summer.

Memories of the orchard

Terry Elphick, who moved to Harpenden with her family in 1957, aged 13, remembers helping out on the children’s home farm. 

Workshops & Printing School

The Laundry, 1914

The buildings in this area were once workshops, teaching shoemaking, woodwork and printing to young men at the children’s home. The young women were taught book binding, and also skills such as laundry and dressmaking to prepare them for domestic service. The printing workshop (the building with the sawtooth roof) was the printing school for the National Children’s Home with apprentices coming from other children’s homes around the country.

Memories of the workshops and printing school

Geoffrey Atkinson, who was cared for at Highfield Oval from 1953, talks about the different skills that were taught at the printing school.

Here he remembers the trades practiced in the other workshops

The Bakery

Boys making boots, 1953

The bakery at the children’s home baked over 150 loaves for the children every day! It also provided training and employment for young people growing up at the home.

Memories of the bakery

See footage of the bakery at the start of this short 1950s film about Highfield children’s home.

The Hospital

Medical room at Highfield Children’s Home, date unknown

The building now called the Hospitality Suite was once a hospital for the children’s home. The hospital was opened in 1927. The link between a window view from a hospital bed and shorter recovery times, now suggested by research, seems to have been reflected in the design of the building nearly a 100 years ago. According to the archives, the children’s home development committee studied plans for the hospital in November 1923 and called for, “Windows for dormitories to be sufficiently low to enable children to look out, the size of the window panel increased and the frames reduced accordingly.”

Memories of the hospital

Shelagh Cosgrove was looked after at the children’s home between 1945 and 1952. Here she describes her memories of the hospital and her views on the physical and emotional care she received here as a child.

Transcript

I remember being particularly prone to coughs, colds, and respiratory problems.  (The smog, coal smoke, cigarette smoke, and dampness of England in those days were probably not very helpful either). But all of us children were given daily doses of cod liver oil, orange juice, and malt before leaving for school.  Having a hospital on the grounds was also very good because scrapes and cuts and bruises happen wherever there are children playing outside, and I had my share of minor disasters that ended with having to go to the surgery for plasters, bandages, iodine swabs and so on. I spent a lot of time swinging on gym poles, and in the woods, climbing trees, oblivious to the thorns, nettles, wood splinters, rust and insects.  Riding bikes and skates around the Oval was a source of much joy, too, and came with the possibility of injuries if you fell.  I scrumped apples in the orchard, hiked down to the cemetery on a dare one night with a couple of other girls.   I remember one cold morning out in the garden at the back of Ferens, helping to dig a plot for some plants. I was wearing rubber wellingtons that are not very warm or protective, and managed to put a tyne of the pitchfork into a big toe!   I didn’t feel it at the time, but when I came to take the wellingtons off in the boot room, there was blood in my boot.  Sister Cora hiked me off to the clinic immediately and iodine and plaster was applied.  I still have the scar to this day!   When I think of it, it’s a wonder I remained in one piece as much as I did. 

That our physical care and well-being was taken care of is without question. But what of the emotional or psychological needs of children?   For me, this is where I feel things fell somewhat short.  I know the Sisters and the staff were good to us, given the understanding of children and their place in those times.  The focus was on behavior and there were rules and strict enforcement of them too.  This included punishments of various kinds, from having pocket money stopped, free time restricted, having to go to bed early on a beautiful summer evening, and for the boys, being spanked with a slipper, or whipped with a cane.  This was all normal in England in those times, even for kids in normal homes, and those expensive boarding schools.  The authorities did what they knew—but I feel there was a serious lack of understanding about a child’s emotional needs, especially the trauma of having lost one’s original family, or promises made and broken about visits from members of one’s own family.    

Taken with permission from an address given in the chapel during an NCH reunion, July 2010 by Shelagh Cosgrove.