I’m Starting a New School.
Lauren found my camera in a field yesterday and earned fifty quid.
Pentridge Down sits high above North Dorset, topped by Pembury Knoll — an ancient Iron Age fort looking out across Cranborne Chase. Hardy used it as inspiration for Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Yesterday, it became the final classroom of the year for our fourth-year Civil Engineering with Architecture students.
After an hour’s drive from Southampton, we hauled models, lunch, a battery pack, folding tables and a fifty-inch television onto the hill. Halfway up, I stopped to launch Timmy the drone. I was carrying the rear end of the TV box at the time and placed my tiny Insta360 camera on top of it while I got the drone into the air.
Then we carried on walking.
Timmy struggled in the wind, flying backwards ahead of us while filming the expedition through foot-high grass towards the summit. Eventually, we reached the top, opened sandwiches and a few beers, and started setting up presentations around the concrete trig point.
The students had spent three months designing what we called Celestial Structures. Think Stonehenge meets modern engineering — structures tied to landscape, sky, orientation, shadow and time.
And then I realised my camera was gone.
“Howard… I’ve lost my camera.”
“You left it on the box.”
“Where?”
Howard shrugged.
Needle. Haystack.
Then came the breakthrough. Timmy had been filming the walk up the hill. We plugged the drone into my laptop and gathered around the screen like archaeologists examining ancient footage. The first clip confirmed the camera was sitting on top of the box. The second revealed a dry, brown patch of grass where we’d briefly stopped after the drone crashed and had to be relaunched.
So we headed back down the hill.
Jack connected my phone to the camera app and started scanning for a signal. Weak wifi. Then stronger. The camera was still alive.
“There’s fifty quid for whoever finds it,” I announced.
That changed the mood considerably.
Suddenly, everyone was on their knees in the grass using phones as scanners, crawling around like a low-budget search-and-rescue team. Then Paul arrived.
“What on earth are you lot doing?”
“Carl’s lost his camera. There’s fifty quid if you find it.”
Paul was on the floor immediately. Even David abandoned lunch-monitor duties to join the search.
At one point, we formed a circle and took turns shouting our names into the grass while listening through the camera microphone, trying to triangulate its location through voice and volume. Which, remarkably, started narrowing down the search area.
Eventually, Lauren leapt up.
“I’ve got it!”
Huge cheer.
We climbed back to the summit with that strange burst of energy that comes after a small collective victory, before the presentations finally began.
But standing there afterwards, watching students present ambitious ideas around a television powered by a battery pack atop a windy hill in Dorset, I found myself thinking how overcomplicated education actually is.
Why does everything require enormous buildings, sprawling administration, endless strategy documents and layers of management? Because yesterday felt more like education than most education does.
A group of people solving problems together. Thinking critically. Using technology naturally. Learning through doing. No departments. No committees. No internal politics. Just intelligent people trying to work something out together.
It made me wonder whether the future of education might actually be smaller schools rather than larger ones. Portable schools. Temporary schools. Small groups gathering around interesting problems in interesting places.
A decentralised landscape of critical thinkers.
So, the Pentridge School of Design & Engineering is now officially open.
David is Head of School and lunch monitor.
Term starts September 8th.
All the best
This Week’s Links:
The dos and don’ts of living room design.
New Kit Kat packaging – new take on ‘Have a Break…’
A triangular shelter elevated on stilts in Ecuador.
Main Image credit: The search operation reaches its dramatic conclusion.
