A decision has been made due to 'substantial' financial losses
ByAnita Merritt
29 AUG 2024
A Devon college has closed with 'immediate effect' resulting in job losses and disruption to students. Dartington Hall Trust (DHT) has confirmed it is no longer financially viable to keep Schumacher College in Dartington open due to 'substantial' mounting losses, despite previously assuring there were no plans for its closure.
The decision was made at a board meeting of the Schumacher College Foundation this Tuesday, August 27. All BSc, MA and PGDip courses, presently supported by University of Plymouth, will close.
The courses were already closed to new students. The trust said 46 students were expected to continue into the 2024/25 academic year and that 58 other students are being supported to complete the last academic year.
The majority of the college's 32 staff are facing redundancy. The trust says shorter, unaccredited courses planned for 2024/25 'have met with poor bookings' and said its 'limited reserves' have resulted in the closure decision.
It added Dartington Board is currently considering 'viable option's for the college to sustain itself, including a proposal from the college’s learning leadership team to secure independence from Dartington, as well as continuation of financially viable, unaccredited courses.
Robert Fedder, acting CEO of Dartington, said: "It is with great regret that this decision has had to be made in a very short space of time. The priority is to support every student affected in achieving the best possible outcome for alternative course arrangements or an agreed withdrawal."
He continued: “While part of Dartington’s historical role as a charitable trust has been to provide financial support to its long-established learning activities, in this case, Schumacher, even when they are unable to break even, the commitment does not extend to risking the future of the whole trust and estate.”
In September 2023, incoming students at Schumacher College were told their Masters courses, which were due to begin in four days, had suddenly been postponed. The trust said the decision was made to postpone some of the courses as part of its financial review.
Some courses continued with others postponed 'indefinitely'. In December 2023, Mr Fedder penned an open letter to dispel what he stated as 'misinformation about the state of affairs' at Dartington Hall and assured that its appointed turnaround team was striving to secure the future of the estate.
Within the letter he said: "Schumacher College, as an important element of the estate’s activities, naturally forms part of the present financial and strategic review. There are no plans for closure and it will continue to be an important part of Dartington."
However, the trust has now confirmed the 'very real prospect' of appointing administrators was reached last autumn and following its financial review, the 'only remaining option' was to reduce operating losses and develop a model for the estate to sustain itself 'after decades of shrinking to survive'.
The trust added the college remains, 'by some distance', its largest loss maker among several operating activities in the red. The trust also said that 'despite giving it time to address its financial shortfall' and a growing deficit, as well as 'occupying a prime location' on the estate, no internal rent had been charged, pointing out that fees were not covering salaries and other day-to-day costs.
Mr Fedder continued: "There is a long-held misconception among some stakeholders that DHT’s historic attractions and commercial activities, which have clearly faced their own financial challenges, solely exist to fund perennial losses in its educational interests. This is absolutely not the case.
"Trust staff have worked extremely hard in the last 12 months to secure a sustainable future for the estate. Cash outflows of the magnitude presented by Schumacher are an area of very high risk for the trust which ultimately still has to maintain, at great cost, several listed buildings and gardens of important historical interest.”
The college has been supported by the trust since 1991. It described itself as being a progressive college for ecological studies offering masters programmes, a new undergraduate programme in Regenerative Food and Farming, short courses and a six-month agroecology residency. Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
No, but have been a few times in the past for courses, events etc. An important place for green / sustainability / hippie types, so its loss will be felt keenly in those circles. Not sure if it will be lost as an event space too, which would also be a huge shame. The 'middle class virtue signaller' label applies for many attendees but it was also somewhere people could be employed teaching valuable land-based skills, and there's not really anywhere else like it in the country for that.
Yes agreed. We lived on Dartington estate for 9 years till last autumn; daughters went to Park School there. No SATS exams. Lots of outdoor stuff.
Beautiful, and silent nights bar the owls, deer and younguns partying by the river.
My Mrs used to cook nice stuff for Schumacher students in the old refectory.
But not been financially viable for years, slowly selling bits off for housing. Or maybe it needs a boss who's not in it for the wonga.
Latest fella has pissed just about everyone off.
A rightly grumpy old music lecturer from the old college of Arts which shut down 12/14 years ago who I know posted this today about Dartington:
I posted recently about Dartington and the Schumacher College's closure. I asked: "Who cares?" A good friend objected saying there will be staff and students who do care.
That's undoubtedly the case. But my experience of Dartington and its various enterprises goes back to the late 1960s and if you review this history a clear pattern becomes apparent. Typically a good idea is seeded, grows to something interesting enough to attract real loyalty from those who come into contact with it. Eventually, however, the rug is pulled from under those devotees and the said enterprise closes. I remember this happening with Staverton Builders and there were a number of other cases. Dartington Hall School, of course, was lost due to becoming a tabloid scandal - which was a shame. In more recent times we have seen the end of the world famous Summer School of Music, now Schumacher College plus, of course, the worst eventuality of all, the College of Arts.
So what is it about Dartington? Well, that's a reasonable question: inappropriate appointees to powerful positions, mismanagement and so on. Is there something structurally wrong with the model? What typically happens is that there's anger, outrage and confusion, alternative plans and protests - none of which come to anything. So my question is: given the history of now defunct enterprises how long is one supposed to be tolerant, how long can false optimism be maintained? You get to the point where you really don't care. Well I have...
Interesting to hear Mark, thanks for sharing. I can imagine it would have been a pretty nice place to live, esp to raise kids too.
I can relate to the music lecturer's perspective, albeit with not the same depth of experience. Definitely the case in veg growing that 'false optimism' is pretty much the only thing keeping it going at this point. This closure represents another door slamming on the viability of the sector because now there's only the biodynamic courses left where people can go to pick up the kind of in depth knowledge you need to actually run a market garden. A very expensive way in, only open to the privileged, and my preference is to 'learn by doing' and work your way up to it gradually, but it's clear that at a certain point you need to sit down and do some actual training to get to that management level. But then, to do all that only to find that it's impossible to make it pay under the constraints of late stage capitalism... it's arguably doing everyone a favour to not waste their time, effort and money on this in the first place. Except of course that these are the skills that will become rather essential as the system unravels...
Paraphrasing Derrick Jensen: there isn't going to be a voluntary transition to a sane & sustainable way of living. This country is busy sealing its own fate in a way guaranteed to lead to the worst possible outcomes, pissing in the faces of those who are trying to present different options. That means the transition is going to be involuntary, and it's not going to be pretty.
Death and Rebirth: Farewell, dear Schumacher College, hello new friends
by Shaun Chamberlin | Aug 31, 2024
Ah, Schumacher College. There’s a name to conjure with…
For so many of us, it summons magical memories of truly life-changing times. To this day, I remember the tingling surge of energy in my body during the fortnight of the “Life After Oil” course I took there in 2006 — as one attendee put it, I had the air about me of a man in an oasis, after wandering a desert for years.
And with good reason. It was there that I first found a peer group around my concern about our collective future. There that I began shedding the deep ache of feeling alone with the apocalypse. There that I met perhaps a dozen people who remain friends to this day, including luminaries like David Fleming, Rob Hopkins and Stephan Harding. And from there that I can trace a clear thread to the profoundly satisfying work I do today, helping others out of that solitude and into empowered community.
And indeed, it was in that very same place, a decade later, that I taught my own ‘Community, Place and Play: A Post-Market Economics‘. What a profoundly-felt honour it was to myself ascend the forbidden stairs to the teachers’ rooms, to sleep in the bed where so many of my heroes had, to contribute the fruits of my past decade to nourish the place that had so nourished me…
One treasured memory is watching the participants’ eyes widen during the first session, wherein Mark Boyle and I lifted the sheet in the centre of the room to reveal our pooled teachers’ fees, converted to cash (£5 and £10 notes actually, to make a decent heap!). This we then gifted equally to each of them, under only the condition that they must collectively decide what to do with it.
Initially taken aback, over the ensuing hours they eagerly talked through the decision — gradually revealing to themselves and each other their true beliefs about the value of money — while also processing our own complete lack of financial motivation to be there. That felt a true Schumacher moment, shifting the timbre of our time together far outside that of just another ‘course’, in a way that so many alumni know well.
As so often, David Fleming nailed the heart of what is wrong with most modern education,
If the intention is to provide serried ranks of dutiful contestants on a short fuse, alone and bewildered, with a high degree of accomplishment in the art of bluffing their way through, modern education is making good progress. But it is time, now, for a change of course.
Schumacher most assuredly represented that change of course. Yet for all those cherished experiences, two days ago news broke that the College is closing, abruptly. That my true alma mater (my three years at the University of York brought me just about nothing) is to be no more. So, what went wrong?
Well, others can speak to that story with far more knowledge and power than I can. Certainly I was horrified to see how atrociously the current students have (again) been treated:
From my distant vantage point, such disrespect smells like a classic case of institutionalisation. Of a college (or the owners of its assets) forgetting the wise words attributed to W.E.B. Du Bois,
Two things and only two things are necessary — teachers and students. Buildings and endowments may help, but they are not indispensable.
Of course all institutions, at any point in history, can lose track of what made them worthwhile to begin with.
But in times like ours — times of cultural, ecological and economic collapse — there is another hazard to navigate, as conventional models of employment cease to function in the ways we might be accustomed to. As ever more parasites seek to profit from anything worthwhile, those doing the real work that Du Bois spoke of will find it ever harder to find security (at least when sought in the form of money). Much of great value will accordingly continue to be lost.
And yet, and yet… the teachers still exist — unemployed though some now suddenly are — as do those who wish to learn about life well lived through such times.
And so happily, perhaps inevitably, as small, alternative colleges around the world seem to be falling like the proverbial flies, many of us are already creating the simpler, lighter, less money-dependent structures within which that can take place.
Off the top of my head, in very different forms: EcoGather, The Peasantry School, Black Mountains College, the Post Apocalypse School of Teeside, the New School of the Anthropocene, A School Called Home… And of course my own Surviving the Future: Conversations for Our Time. To name but a handful.
Containers all seeking to carry forward that fire that so often graced Schumacher College with its presence — the fire, really, that was all that mattered about Schumacher College, or any college — even as the buildings and endowments fall away.
Posted by Keith-264 on September 5, 2024, 8:28 am, in reply to "Shaun Chamberlin"
"Two things and only two things are necessary — teachers and students. Buildings and endowments may help, but they are not indispensable."
This reminds me of Wolf Wolfensberger et al. on the de-institutionalisation of "care" models. Notice who is going to suffer over the closure? The can't be the service users of there are other people who won't suffer - the bureaucrats, that makes them the service users. Another example of the Leninist economy for the rich and the fascist economy for the rest of us.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Typo frenzy
Posted by Keith-264 on September 5, 2024, 2:13 pm, in reply to "Re: Shaun Chamberlin"
This reminds me of Wolf Wolfensberger et al. on the de-institutionalisation of "care" models. Notice who is going to suffer over the closure? The[y] can't be the service users f there are other people who won't suffer - the bureaucrats, that makes them the service users. Another example of the Leninist economy for the rich and the fascist economy for the rest of us.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Re: Typo frenzy
Posted by Ian M on September 5, 2024, 7:20 pm, in reply to "Typo frenzy"
Thanks for correcting, though had to deduce that it was 'if there are other people' with the i in square brackets acting as a shortcut to italicise the rest of the sentence.
Have you got a link on Wolfensberger? Not sure I follow your point about de-institutionalisation. Is the argument in favour of it? I understand that people in care who were de-institutionalised have oftentimes ended up in a worse situation, eg: mentally ill people becoming homeless when Reagan closed down the asylums in the US. But yes, the institutions aren't there to truly serve the needs of the apparent 'service users', rather to manage social problems in a way that causes least damage to market fundamentalism (or can even benefit it if they can get the service to run on a business model).
Posted by Keith-264 on September 5, 2024, 10:05 pm, in reply to "Re: Typo frenzy"
In "Normalisation" and "The Origin and Nature of our Institutional Models" Wolfie describes how medical model institutions don't work well with chronic conditions; people are expected to 'get well' but they don't. Normalisation and its later development, Social Role Valorisation, sought to reverse the deleterious effects of institutions by abolishing them and creating non-deviancy enhancing alternatives. Care in the community is the only care there is and is the opposite of neglect in the community. In Britain it was all pissed up the wall by the NHA & CCA 1990, which took out the money and replaced it with incompetence, negligence and corruption. Nazi bastados.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Re: Typo frenzy
Posted by Ian M on September 6, 2024, 6:24 pm, in reply to "Re: Typo frenzy"
Thanks, sounds like an interesting guy. I can see that people suffering from chronic conditions would suffer from profit-oriented healthcare when it comes to taking up bed space in hospitals. On the other hand it can be a gift to pharmaceutical companies if they can sell palliative products long term to a captive market.
'Care in the community is the only care there is' - agreed, like everything else healthcare has been professionalised and peoples' ability to address their own ailments has been undermined and/or completely taken away, leaving them entirely at the mercy of the expert class. Same goes for education: what sense does it make to pay strangers thousands of pounds to teach you something that you should have been taught for free growing up by elders who knew all the relevant knowledge from decades of firsthand experience? But everything in the dominant culture militates against that kind of human scale autonomy.
College students rage over sudden closure By Richard Torne Thursday 29th August 2024 3:32 pm
Students have expressed dismay at the news that Schumacher College is to close.
Dartington Hall Trust (DHT), which owns the College, announced late on Wednesday (August 28) that due to mounting losses the board had decided to close all courses supported by the University of Plymouth “with immediate effect”.
The closure will affect some 46 students who were only days away from starting the academic year, as well as 33 staff, who have been given a 30-day consultation period for redundancy.
However, students who contacted this paper said they were not informed of the decision and only heard about the closure after reading about it on our website.
Willoh Wood, who is studying for a BSc in regenerative food and farming, said: “It was an incredibly heartbreaking and surreal experience to learn that the most important part of your life has fallen apart by reading a local newspaper.
“The audacity of Dartington Hall Trust to speak to journalists before informing their students that their degree is cancelled is astounding. We are coming together as a college to organise and would appreciate the support of the local community.”
The mother of a student who wished to remain anonymous said her daughter heard of the closure from this paper only the night before.
“At 10pm last night she was sent the article. Her first reaction was that it was not true because no-one had been contacted. It’s absolutely appalling,” she said, adding that her daughter, who is a second-year student, had been looking forward to the start of the new course.
“To hear it in this way is awful. We’re absolutely gutted as a family,” she said.
In its announcement, DHT said students had been contacted “via a dedicated email channel”, adding that Dartington would “approach them individually as early as possible in w/c 2 September to discuss courses of action case-by-case”.
In its first 50 years Dartington Hall was a roaring success. Then came incompetence, with trusts and CEOs selling off the family silver and land to keep it afloat. Developers preying on communities to build substandard and overpriced housing is nothing new but, says Rob Hopkins, the people of Devon are taking a stand
Friday 21 February 2020 13:05 GMT
I don’t expect you to care very much about this story. After all, it’s nothing exceptional. All across the country, much the same thing is happening, to varying degrees, going mostly unreported. It’s an unspoken epidemic, and I could just as easily be writing about any of those other stories. But this one particularly matters to me. It’s on my doorstep. It’s about a place I love. And it’s a story of incompetence, injustice and a community that has had enough.
It is the story of Dartington Hall in south Devon. Local people still have access to the 1,200-acre estate’s footpaths, beautiful gardens, cinema, cafes and bar. It is home to about 170 pioneering social enterprises, and to many people doing amazing work. It hosts 42 heritage buildings, some pioneering early 20th century architecture, and a Henry Moore sculpture.
Like a football match, our story is one of two halves. In 1923, Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst bought the estate to develop as an experiment bringing together the arts, education, agriculture, architecture, craftsmanship, dance and more to see if together they might create a different model for rural regeneration. For the first 50 years, it was a roaring success. Rabindranath Tagore spent time there, as did Michael Chekhov. The NHS and the welfare state were designed there. In its time, it was a hotbed for radical ideas.
Then the Elmhirsts died, she in 1968 and he in 1974, leaving the estate in trust, and the second half of our story began. Left with buildings and very little cash, the decline set in. A series of boards and CEOs lived off a long-distant legacy as the family silver, both literally and metaphorically, was sold off. Huge salaries were paid to the managers who oversaw this decline, and whenever the finances dipped low, the trust would sell off another field around the neighbouring village to developers, usually in the face of staunch local opposition.
Local people have compared the situation to the legend of the minotaur: once a year, local people had to offer up another teenager (in this case, a field) to satisfy the rapacious appetite of the minotaur (here, an organisation incapable of living within their means). Local planners, under the cosh from central government to meet housing targets, were only too happy to oblige with the necessary planning consents.
It came to a head in 2014, when the trust offered 17 fields up for mass housing developments without any consideration for the impact on the community or environment. Local people, campaigning under the slogan “Don’t Bury Dartington Under Concrete”, held a vote of no confidence in the board of Dartington Hall Trust (which resoundingly lost) and in response the trust promised a new future relationship with the community, one where the majority of development would only take place on the “core estate”, ending the practice of selling fields around the village.
Instead, in September 2018, to raise much-needed cash the trust came up with the idea of a bond issue, aiming to raise £20m of investment into the estate. They spent £1.15m on consultants and legal advice, but when the shares launched it tanked, raising just £50,000. Hardly a resounding return on investment.
Even though many other people were clearly involved and it had been approved by the entire board, the CEO took the bullet and was sacked. Instead, it was announced that so dire were the trust’s finances – they had lost £5m in the past year alone – that they would now have to sell off two large pieces of land around a village already home to plenty of new houses, making way for potentially several hundred more, despite promising that they would not be sold until 2028. In their 2015 accounts, the trust wrote: “We will need to devise a model which does not require asset sales to support the heritage costs of our estate or our activities.”
We now know, however, that while this promise was being made, the board was actively moving forward with the sale behind closed doors. Things were so financially dire that the trust had “no choice”, it said. And all of this is taking place in the context of a government poised to rip up most planning controls in a free-for-all for developers in which communities have very little say. “Take back control” indeed.
So far, so familiar. Like communities across the land, we are now threatened with hundreds of homes being built, adding to already unsustainable congestion along the traffic corridor linking Torbay to Plymouth – which has consistently breached legal (and safe) air pollution limits for over a decade. With NHS boss Simon Stevens declaring air pollution a “health emergency” in the UK, local people are all too aware of the impacts this development will have, particularly on their children’s health (with seven schools along the stretches of road most affected). It is hard to fathom how the trust’s board can reconcile the contradictions between its own sustainability objectives and the social and environmental impacts of selling its land to developers.
That story needs to be rooted in commons, in community, in modelling the most proactive and imaginative responses to the climate emergency. The future depends on engaging and working with local people, not against their interests
But this is Totnes. This is Dartington. People do things differently here. It’s a town that has pioneered community-led approaches to development. It’s an active and engaged community that understands sustainability and social justice and is home to many exemplary projects modelling just that. Much as people love the Dartington Hall estate, they have had enough of Dartington Hall Trust. They no longer believe them. When the trust tells people that “we just need to sell these two more fields and then we will be able to be financially solvent into the future”, to them it sounds like an alcoholic saying “just this one last bottle of whisky and then I’ll give up”. It appears the trust hasn’t learnt its lesson.
And so local people have formed a new organisation, Saving Dartington, which is taking a coordinated and focused approach to halting the sales. Their mission is to hold the trustees to account for their actions, arguing that if things carry on as they are, without substantial and fundamental changes, there will be no third part to the Dartington story. That story needs to be rooted in commons, in community, in modelling the most proactive and imaginative responses to the climate emergency. The future depends on engaging and working with local people, not against their interests.
The Saving Dartington group is submitting a formal complaint to the Charity Commission about how the trust is operating. They are looking into a potential legal challenge based on the impact additional housing will have on air quality on the road that passes local schools through the village. They are also seeking protection for the greater horseshoe bats that depend on the land for survival. They have applied, along with Don’t Bury Dartington, to have one of those fields, Broom Park, designated as an “asset of community value”, based upon a vision of it as a community resource for biodiversity and community engagement.
In short, they are doing everything they can to block a development that, on sustainability grounds alone, should never have been on the cards in the first place. They are concerned that the trust’s promise of “only 80 eco-houses” built on Broom Park are bogus because any contract for the field’s sale will include an “uplift”, earning more revenue for every additional house the developer can squeeze on. In short, they have very little trust left.
While across the country the story of developers preying on communities to build substandard, overpriced housing is nothing new, here, in Dartington, in theory at least, things should be different. Dartington Hall Trust is, after all, an organisation which “aspires to bring together people and ideas to become a testbed and model for a sustainable society”. They have pledged to become carbon neutral by 2025… but to fund this by building hundreds of concrete houses is like funding it by opening a coal mine.
Saving Dartington’s imaginative approach to campaigning is one that has the best interests of the estate at its heart. They are opposing the way the trust is behaving not because they hate the place, but because they love it. But unless they can bring about fundamental change in the governance and culture of the organisation, it will soon be asset-stripped and picked apart by developers.
“What if”, Saving Dartington asks, “this organisation actually lived its values and acted as though this actually were a climate emergency?”Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
Thanks T, yes it is sad. Not aware of anything else able to step into the breach. It will probably have to be replaced by small, unofficial educational projects like Shaun Chamberlin mentions in the above article. I guess it relates to the whole system of higher education in the UK where kids are no longer willing or able to go into debt to get qualifications that carry less & less value over time, and the institutions will start going bust as a result. Sheep guy discussed it well, I think posted here a while ago: https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/07/23/the-return-of-the-cargo-cult/
Speaking of pathways only open to the privileged, prepare to cringe:
'Here's one of our BSc Regenerative Farming students Tallula Headington on what she's learned so far about the inspiring life-long learning model we practice here at Dartington.'
Posted by RaskolnikovX on September 5, 2024, 6:43 pm, in reply to "Tallula Headington"
Love me some cringe and this delivered; she could get a gig as speech writer for Kamala although I suspect she'll end up having some Goop kind of deal selling wellness accessories and positive vibes. ...no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Love me some cringe and this delivered; she could get a gig as speech writer for Kamala although I suspect she'll end up having some Goop kind of deal selling wellness accessories and positive vibes.
Thanks for watching it Rask, and assessing. Not being a fan of 'cringe' meself, so excuse me for not watching etc. Sounds dreadful tbh. Ta.
on September 4, 2024, 1:50 pm