Sybil Marshall
1913-2005
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Sybil Mary Edwards was born in November 1913 at Ramsey Heights. She was educated from 1919-1923 at Ramsey Heights Elementary School, before moving to Ramsey Grammar School in 1924.
Unable to attend university because no scholarship was available, she started work in 1933 as an untrained teacher, first in Essex and then closer to home in Huntingdon.
In 1942 Sybil was appointed as uncertified headteacher to Kingston Primary School in Cambridgeshire. There, she worked on her own in one room with 26 pupils aged between 4 and 11.
To excite and engage the pupils to love learning, Sybil developed her own teaching methods and encouraged children's creativity. Referred to as the 'symphonic method', school subjects were integrated rather than taught separately, and the approach promoted a creative art-based model of learning.
Later written up as An Experiment in Education, (published in 1963) the methods developed at Kingston, influenced the 1967 Plowden Report into Primary Education in Britain.
A true CHANGEMAKER - Sybil's overall impact on primary education in England was evident, and was just what was needed at the time to shake up a tired curriculum.
Her book and her work in Education played a key role in liberalising the primary curriculum.
Sybil later set to recording her family memories of life on Lotting Fen, Huntingdonshire.
Fenland Chronicles is a collection of her mother's and father's memories of their lives in this small area of the Cambridgeshire Fens.
This was followed up years later by Once Upon a Village (1979), The Silver New Nothing (1987) and A Pride of Tigers (1992).
And then, at the age of 80 she began writing her first novel. Semi- autobiographical, A Nest of Magpies was published in 1993 and followed by Sharp Through The Hawthorn (1994) and Strip The Willow (1996) .
Created by Sally Elding (volunteer at Ramsey Rural Museum) for the Changemakers Project
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