Everyone should experience life at a rural state school

Living in the country as a kid lands you with a hundred stigmas: everyone in your town is a racist, your Mum owns chickens and the nearest town is over an hour away. It’s an odd upbringing in comparison to your uni mates from Surrey, and along with the weird and slightly backward parts, the quirks of living in the countryside are unparalleled.

Country life is almost nothing like being in the Famous Five

A lot of people who live in towns have an idyllic version of rural England in their heads – its somewhere they can visit on holiday, get a change of scene and enjoy nature. When I came to University, I realised that many of my friends knew almost nothing about what it’s actually like to grow up in the countryside. As with anywhere, there are positives and negatives, and there’s nothing like school life to bring out the strange quirks of rural communities.

We weren’t an ethnically diverse bunch. There was one black guy

I’m never a hundred per cent sure why, but the countryside is really dominated by white people. Rutland, my home county, is home to just 37,369 people, and 97% of us are white. When you’re growing up, that gives you an odd view of what the world actually looks like. National debates on immigration and cultural diversity seemed pretty irrelevant to our daily lives. This pale majority also allowed some pretty horrible attitudes to flourish among some of my fellow students in secondary school.

People would use the words “gypsy” and “Jew” as insults

I’m fairly sure these people knew what they were doing was wrong. Although they were a minority, students yelling “Jew”, “gippo” and “pikey” across the classroom went pretty much unchallenged. Sure, the teachers might have said something to them every now and again, but it didn’t seem to make much difference, and I’m ashamed to say that the rest of us were too concerned about looking like goody-two-shoes to speak out. It’s awful to think how a Jewish or traveller student would have felt in that environment, but there just wasn’t anyone from those communities, so those making fun of them never learned the consequences of their actions.

What we lacked in ethnic diversity, we made up for in the range of incomes

A fairly common misconception about the country side is that if you live there, you must be loaded. There definitely were some people at my school whose mums lived between the Aga, the Range Rover, and the Joules shop, but there were also people from much less well-off families. This was probably one of the best things about secondary school for me, because I learned that it’s possible to get on with people no matter what job their parents do. Being somewhere in the middle of the income spectrum, I also developed an appreciation for the nice things my mum and dad could afford.

We made some strange assumptions about people at private schools.

My secondary school shares a town with Uppingham School, one of the UK’s most expensive and well known private schools. Even though there wasn’t a lot of interaction between the two groups of students, my peers and I had some very fixed views about what the posh kids must be like. Mainly, we massively overestimated how much money they must have had. Some girls even talked about trying to marry Uppingham boys for their money! Secondly, we always heard about Uppingham School drugs scandals, which made us think it was some kind of debauched, parent-free party house.

Beating private schools at anything felt brilliant.

When I was in year ten, we beat Uppingham School at rugby. Then, after I’d left, my brother and a group of his friends won a physics competition against a load of other private schools, including Rugby and Stamford. I’m sure there have been other victories, but the point is, they were all marvellous. Why? Because we felt at a natural disadvantage to these schools. Because they had so much money and kept building flash new facilities in town while we were being taught in porta cabins. Because they all had the same floppy bleach blonde hair!

We spent every winter hoping to be snowed in.

Arguably one of the best things about everyone living in tiny, spread out villages is that you can genuinely be snowed in. A weather event that might mean slippery pavements in the city can stop rural areas from functioning at all, particularly if the local council fails to get its arse in gear with the gritter lorries before the snow hits. My village is accessible only down three very steep hills, and when it snowed the bus drivers just weren’t willing to risk it. Sometimes it was so bad no-one’s parents could give us a lift, so no school! If you were one of the unlucky ones who made it to class, you could save the teacher time on the register by telling them which villages were cut off that day. Of course, the real hope was for the announcement on Rutland Radio that the school was closed all together!

So there you have it. Going to the school in the countryside won’t mess you up any more than going to any other school, and at least our cross country lessons in P.E. were accurately named!