IVC governors: 10 Jan 09

One of the things that happens when you become a county councillor is that you are immediately invited to give up more of your spare time to engage in more civic duty. And so it was that a couple of years ago I was invited to be a ‘local authority governor’ at Impington Village College. I was flattered, I said yes. Today we had a second away day to address matters strategic.

IVC opened in 1939 and was the fourth village college to be established based on the ‘vision’ of Henry Morris who was Director of Education of Cambridgeshire at the time. It was a credit to the great man that much of what we talked about today was consistent with the vision which he set out: life long learning, partnership working and an integration of vocational and academic education.

Part of our deliberations today related to ‘mission’ and somehow we were smart enough to invite students from the school to start us off on this and several of them joined us for that part of the day. As we talked about what makes IVC special they were vocal about the ethos within the school whereby teachers and students appear to work as a team without boundaries and with everyone ‘participating and contributing to the achievements of all’.

We also spent some time trying to think about the challenges of running the school in the decades to come and one issue which we will clearly need to address is the continuing and pervasive impact of IT. It is a great enabler but at the same time it’s recognised that IT is not the best medium for developing necessary social skills. It will be a challenge.

Henry Morris made another significant contribution to IVC. He believed that ‘The design, decoration and equipment of our places of education cannot be regarded as anything less than of first-rate importance – as equally important, indeed, as the teacher.’ IVC was designed by architects Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry and is the only example of Gropius’ work in the UK. Gropius was a co-founder of the Bauhaus style and is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modern architecture.

It was a stimulating and humbling day.