Autumn 2024 Edition - written by Sam Dodd in conversation with kirsten houser and arms shabir

For our Autumn In-Focus piece, our editor Sam Dodd interviewed Kirsten Houser, our Education Manager, and Arms Shabir, our Education and Youth Engagement Intern, for some interesting info on our education offering, young farmers scheme, and education history here at Spitalfields.

The Education programme currently

For the last few years, the Farm has been working hard on building up our education offering. Education is one of the core parts of the Farm’s purpose and mission, bringing animal and horticulture experiences to thousands of children every year, both local and from further afield.

Currently, the Education programme covers tours of the farm for local primary schools (roughly 40%) and London-wide primary schools (roughly 60%) – this forms part of our income and is paid for by schools that have the budget. If schools want to visit but don’t have the budget, they are welcomed onto site then take themselves on a self-led tour. We also have an info pack available for £30, which includes an activity book, games and prompts, and tells the reader our animals names, dates of birth, and interesting facts about them. We also get a lot of university-level tours through September and October, around Freshers Week.

From this time of year (the autumn term of the school year) until the Christmas holidays, we run gardening sessions opposite the Farm at St Anne’s Primary School, starting again in February. Inside of school holidays, we run a packed programme of activities – always free – which are a mixture of arts and crafts, nature events, animal handling, and more. There is a lot of vegetable growing happening from Spring to Autumn, which is done in the specially designated Education bed, a raised bed for vegetables grown by all the schools and kids we work with.

We also deliver the Farm to Fork programme in the Summer holidays, which is funded by the Mayor of London under the Kitchen Social project banner, who also fund free school meals during the holidays. This is where we teach kids how to prepare and cook the food that has grown in the Education bed throughout the year.

Young Farmers

Arms, our Education and Youth Engagement Intern (and unofficial Insta-whizz), specialises in our Young Farmers programme (alongside Cat, our newly recruited Youth Engagement Coordinator). This is a very long-running offering, with the earliest records we can find on it dating back to 2003, although it may have begun here at the Farm before that.

The morning session is the older age group, at 14-17yo. The afternoon session is our younger kids, at 10-13yo. These participants are often mental health (CAMHS) or social worker referrals, or kids who struggle socially and are referred by their parents – these ones have often expressed a desire to become vets when they’re older.

A typical programme might include making gyozas from scratch (we used vegetables from the education bed for this), making bird boxes from scratch, gardening, and mucking out at the start of a session to help build routine. We feel it is important to show the hard work that goes into being a farmer and raising animals and vegetables. We also do goal-setting with them, assigning supported areas they feel less confident in, and encouraging them to lead on areas they feel more confident in. Lastly, we are currently also building a fact-file with them, so they are learning about the animals as they’re working with and handling them and recording the learnings for future Young Farmers.

Some kids have additional needs, and need support structures like one-to-one attention, so we have to manage the group mindfully and ensure nobody is missing out. We also work hard at ensuring we ourselves are not burning out as the facilitators. One of the main aims of Young Farmers is to build self-sufficiency in individuals, and life-long skills - fostering a sense of the participants ownership over the space and helping them build an idea of what they like doing and what they are confident in, is essential.

Current and previous long-term farm staff members have started out as Young Farmers here, and also moved onto other farms or animal management courses after participating. Our own Farmyard Manager, Jenny, began her career at Freightliners City Farm as a Young Farmer. We find that lifelong friendships are formed, with many that we know of still ongoing for over a decade, between Young Farmers who did the course together. Kids even bond over mucky tasks like mucking out – they talk all the way through, and are often finished before they even realise they’d started.

What Do You Love About This Work?

Kirsten wanted to do this job because she’d experienced life living and working on a farm and knew it was important for kids to work practically and have a go at things outside and overcome fears. It is important that people know it is an option, and they don’t have to go down traditional labour or white-collar routes if they don’t want to, or it doesn’t suit their passions or skillsets. It is also good for wellbeing, and quietens the mind, especially in a busy city. Even as a kid from the suburbs, she’d still had to go and look for it, so it is even harder for kids in a city to access this reality.

Arms enjoys the variety of the role, and how you’re always doing a different thing from one day to the next. They like seeing the progress the children make, as it is a consistent weekly offering that requires dedication and for those participants to turn up week after week, come rain or shine. They feel it is an amazing experience for kids who are good with animals, and a great way to show the realities of landwork - if you want to work in spaces like this, and sustain them, then it takes hard work – but it is also incredibly rewarding.

Future Plans

We are shortly investing in a new van, which will enable us to do more off-site, and increase our reach – on-site we only have 30 children at once due to our size, so we can only cater for one group at a time. We also want to use our new van to begin taking our workshops out to other schools who can’t visit us here.

The Nest is being rebuilt, into a dry, clean space for handling small animals, arts and craft activities, storage for all our education materials, and a room-scale nature table type of space that holds natural artefacts which kids can look at – stones, skulls, shells, and similar.

We’d also like to do more around wildlife conservation, nature courses, floral design, animal health, pond dipping, evening classes, after-school clubs plant identification – there are endless opportunities and there is definitely a demand for it.

We are expanding our workshop offering this coming year – we are planning on running special days that local schools can attend, where one main activity would take place several times over one day, so multiple schools can visit and experience it separately. These activities will include: Soil science; General animal communication (how to handle them etc); Water cycle day; Recycling and compost; Animal, vegetable and mineral cycles; Reptiles, amphibians, birds – their diets and habitats; British native wildlife - and more!

Watch this space! Sign up for our newsletter here to be notified when these events and workshops launch.

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All through Autumn we have lots of activities happening. These include Farm to Fork, where we’ll cook with farm ingredients; Autumn crafting – skull drawing, leaf drawing, firelighting workshops; and more. Click our What’s On page here to book yourselves in.

We look forward to welcoming you to the Farm soon.