'We are truly blessed': How King Charles's vision of harmony is helping Ayrshire pupils
From farming to thatching and sewing skills to hospitality, at the King’s Dumfries House Ayrshire pupils are learning both skills from the past and for the future
The first task Lee McPhail completed on becoming head teacher of Aucinleck Primary School in October 2021 was to phone Dumfries House.
He was determined his pupils would benefit from the work of the estate.
Fortunately, the timing was right - The King’s Foundation, which runs the house, was looking for a school to take part in the Harmony Project.
“I signed up immediately,” Mr McPhail said.
Rescued for the nation by King Charles, Dumfries House is an 18th-century mansion and 2,000-acre estate in Cumnock, East Ayrshire.
Since purchasing the property in 2007, The King’s Foundation - formerly The Prince’s Trust - has developed a vast education initiative.
Of the 15,000-plus students each year on The King's Foundation's education programmes UK-wide, more than 10,000 study at Dumfries House.
They learn about sustainable food and farming, STEM subjects and textiles, and traditional craft skills crucial to maintaining historic buildings.
Post-covid, particularly when tackling lower attendance figures, Mr McPhail was looking for opportunities for his pupils that would help build connections and prepare children for an unpredictable future.
Auchinleck Primary sits near the site of the former Barony mine, which surrounds the local landscape and was one of the area’s biggest employers.
“The concept we had with the children was the land running about here has been really good to us.
“We need to be really good to the land,” Mr McPhail said.
The project uses themes of “harmony” - such as oneness or interdependence - and teachers build lessons around those themes, both in the classroom and at Dumfries House.
Mr McPhail said: “What we're finding is that we've got real, deep level of involvement when it comes to this type of learning.
“We're seeing more incidents where children are be dysregulated or struggling with aspects of their learning because they're not feeling involved.
“Yet this inquiry-based approach is really whetting their appetite for taking learning places they are keen to go to.”
As a side-effect of the Dumfries House partnership, Auchinleck pupils have found themselves rubbing shoulders with royalty, celebrities and political figures.
They received The King’s Foundation Partnership of the Year Award presented by Alan Titchmarsh, who the pupils had already met at Dumfries House.
They’ve met King Charles, the President of Zambia, and been interviewed for Radio 4.
The youngsters, however, are undaunted.
“Despite coming from an area high in terms of the deprivation, our children go into these situations and they shine,” their head teacher said.
Mr McPhail described a “formal and informal” relationship to the house.
“It goes beyond just the basics,” he said. “If we’ve had problems with children, if there's allegations of bullying behaviour or unkind behaviour, or just children feeling dysregulated, we'll just take the kids down a drive to the garden and go for a walk or do a nature hunt.”
“And before you know it, the kids are opening up.”
When the local leisure centre closed and the school lost its access to swimming lessons, The King’s Foundation offered an alternative at Cumnock outdoor swimming pool.
He adds: “I’m really, truly blessed to have them as partners. They are like an extension of the school now.”
Steven Kelly, principal teacher of guidance at Doon Academy, is also one of a number of local teachers making sure his pupils benefit from the estate.
Mr Kelly is a Cumnock lad so Dumfries House is on his doorstep.
“It was a real place of sanctuary for local people during the pandemic, in terms of the hardships we faced at that time,” he said.
It was a place, Mr Kelly said, where people went to clear their heads.
“And I was one of them,” he said. That made him determined to ensure his pupils would get to experience the house and gardens.
He contacted the education programme and the relationship has built from there.
As well as his role as a guidance teacher, Mr Kelly is in charge of Developing the Young Workforce - or, as the pupils call him, he’s “the careers guy”.
During Positive Destinations Week, pupils visit the estate every day to experience different learning opportunities.
These include everything from STEM subjects to the traditional crafts such as thatching that King Charles has championed.
“They even learn about traditional farming methods, horticulture, things that are not seen as fashionable with young people but get them up close and personal with nature.
“You can’t put a price on that,” Mr Kelly said. “You actually can’t - it’s all free.”
“One of the first groups I took was kids that were disengaged from their learning, who just needed a wee escape and something to reconnect them back to learning,” Mr Kelly said.
Some of these pupils had not been in school for weeks but managed to do five days of educational courses at Dumfries House.
Mr Kelly believes the hands-on, practical elements of the classes are what makes them so effective.
At the STEM centre they might learn to solder a circuit to make a light switch; at the house itself they might use a sewing machine to make wallets and purses.
This is the sort of experience they don’t have access to in school.
Given Doon Academy’s rural location, the school can struggle to recruit and has not had a home economics teacher for several years.
His pupils recently met Raymond Blanc, the Michelin-starred chef, when he visited Dumfries House, by which they were “inspired”.
“There are so many things you can take kids to these days but you’ve got to be careful, particularly in the senior phase, that a day out of school is going to be worthwhile because otherwise you're missing key learning,” Mr Kelly said.
“There are times you take kids out and think, ‘What did we achieve today’, but you don’t ever, ever get that with a King’s Foundation course.”
In the River Lugar, which runs through the estate, pupils take part in “kick sampling” where they hunt for creepy crawlies in the water.
It helps them see a “different world” in the river, Mr Kelly added.
The school sits in a catchment of complex socio-economic deprivation and the area is surrounded by former mining villages that were affected by savage unemployment as the pits closed.
“As a school we try to create opportunities, open doors and strip down barriers for our kids so they get the same access as anybody else has,” Mr Kelly said.
Jacqueline Farrell, originally from Cumnock and now education director at Dumfries House, said: "We have heard Dumfries House described as the best classroom in the world and I don't think you can get a better place to come and learn.
“Nature is an excellent teacher because it is a system that is beautifully in-balance, as long as we do not interfere, as mankind, too much with that balance.”
The education programme features in a new Prime Video documentary, Harmony: A King’s Vision, which airs on February 6.
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