About this website

Keswick Hall College of Education closed its doors for the last time over 30 years ago. Since then former students have continued teaching in schools, day in, day out, during the greatest upheaval in British educational history. Many have taught in other parts of the world and a large number went on to become headteachers; successfully leading their schools. The college, through them, has had a terrific influence on tens of thousands of children.

The purpose of this website is many fold:

1. To keep the spirit of the college alive.

2. To connect the members and college community world-wide.

3. To serve as a conduit for the Keswick Hall Old Students’  Club to advertise events and activities.

Former students and staff are invited to send reminiscences of their time at college,their career, photos, biographies and stories to share with other Keswickians. 

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How this website developed.

It was the school Easter holidays of 2001 and, as headteacher of a Devon Primary School, I was at home writing the latest version of my School’s S.E.F (Self Evaluation Form), a 50 page analysis of all aspects of the school and its achievements: a key part of what Ofsted expected when they inspected our school. I was wondering why I was spending so much of my holiday writing it (again and again) and got to thinking about the things we were told were important at college – children first, not policies and reports etc.

I spent a few hours searching the internet and could find very little about the college, and no obvious ways for former students to communicate. I had previously set up a successful website for my own school a couple of years earlier, so, with the tacit agreement of a couple of students I was in contact with, set the site up with the same hosting organisation. This college website operated for 15 years with thousands of ‘hits’ and hundreds of Guestbook messages. It proved very successful. Initially the site cost nothing to run but during the last decade or so it was taken over by different companies and charges were incurred. However, these were not too onerous and the site was able to keep operating without support.

Then suddenly, out of the blue, in 2016 the company went into receivership and closed down within 24 hours. Most of the data and articles disappeared overnight. I did, however, manage to save the Guestbook messages and most of these are now on this website.

To restart the Keswick Hall site was a daunting task but with retirement in January 2017, the financial support of the Old Students’ Club and a user friendly and reasonably priced website company hosting us, the new site has sprung up like a phoenix from the ashes.

With interest, memories and articles being forthcoming from former students and staff we should be able to keep the Keswick community well connected for many, many years to come. This is a site in development so please contact us (via the Contact Page) with your memories, photos and ideas!