Many educators prioritise learning processes over learning spaces. In whatever setting, a ‘good education’ is most often underpinned by the attributes of the teacher, the willingness of the learners, the appropriateness of the curriculum and the quality of the relationship between teachers and learners. In undertaking the primary research for this book, I have been told – sometimes forcefully – that excellent learning experiences can take place in what appear to be the direst, barest and most impoverished physical surroundings. Indeed, in several of the examples included in this book, learning takes place in run-down portable cabins, simple patches of woodland, condemned buildings and on free buses to the supermarket. As it happens, I am convinced that these educators are correct to prioritise ‘social’ learning processes over learning spaces in this way.

This may seem a strange way for someone who writes as a ‘geographer’ to begin a book about ‘geographies’ of alternative education in the UK. Yet it is prompted by a far stronger conviction that space does matter, in all manner of ways, to practices of alternative education. However, this assertion is based upon a very different theorisation of ‘space’. While some sections of the book do look at such things as the design of school buildings or the layout of classrooms, I aim to demonstrate that geographies of alternative education go far beyond this. Inspired by a rich vein of work in human geography, I begin from the premise that it is impossible to divorce social processes from spatial processes. The reason that most educators prioritise learning processes over learning spaces is that they – like most geographers – recognise that the physical, material elements of a learning environment can tell us very little when viewed in isolation. The question that then emerges is how all of the other,‘social’ processes that characterise a ‘good education’ might be understood in spatial terms.

This book therefore asks fundamental questions about what happens when we understand those social and spatial processes to be productive of one another. In doing so, I attune to some of the spatialities that characterise alternative education in the UK.