Your Children are not your Children

Headfort School has always been an idiosyncratic place. Beginning as an ‘outpost of Empire’ at a time when that empire was locally destitute and internationally disintegrating, it prepared the sons of the landed classes for the ‘great public schools’.

Weaving its way around the Headfort family and its successors as landlord, the School has traced a rapidly evolving educational ethos. It has managed to protect its individuality and excellence, whilst staunchly refusing to adopt any of the more illogical conclusions of a changing society.

Your Children are not your Children is more than a book about a school. It treats such universal issues as co-education, competition, bad language, bullying and homesickness. It reveals the development of Headfort through portraits of the colourful characters on its staff, anecdotes of pupils from every era and accounts of their lurid pranks. The story is augmented by extracts from the ‘Headmaster’s Newsletter’, revealing his thinking about children and education at different stages of his 24-year headmastership, and his startling hatred of political correctness. Told in the inimitable style of Lingard Goulding, whose voice sums up so well the School he served, this book is an engaging account of a living community.