Spin cycles and spelling tests, by Gail Jesmond
An original contemporary newspaper article.
It is half past four on a wet Wednesday, and the Bubbles launderette on Holme Street is full. Six machines are spinning. A tumble dryer is thumping like a heartbeat. And at a long folding table in the window, eleven children are doing long division.
Welcome to what may be the most unlikely homework club in the country. For the last two years, every weekday after school, the launderette has turned into a classroom. There is free Wi-Fi, free squash, a box of donated pencils and, at the head of the table, Mrs Beryl Bannerman, a retired librarian, who is helping a ten-year-old called Leo with his fractions while keeping one eye on her own washing.
The club started almost by accident. Owner Dev Saini noticed that many of his customers, who did not have washing machines at home, were bringing their children with them straight from school. ‘They’d sit on the floor with their schoolbooks on their knees for an hour and a half,’ he says. ‘It seemed daft. I had an old pasting table in the back. So I put it up.’
Within a fortnight, the table was full. Dev bought a second one. A customer offered to help with reading. Then Beryl arrived, and then two sixth-formers from the local academy who needed volunteering hours and stayed long after they had earned them. Now there are thirty children on the books and a rota of nine volunteers. The local primary school has donated a whiteboard, which hangs, slightly crookedly, above the powder dispenser.
The results have surprised everyone, including Dev. Teachers at Holme Street Primary say homework from the club’s regulars arrives on time and finished. One mother, Tracey Haverill, says her son Jayden, who used to ‘hate anything with numbers in it’, now tells her the answers to the sums on the price board. ‘He asked me last week if he could come to the launderette on a day we weren’t even washing,’ she laughs. ‘I never thought I’d hear that.’
Part of the success, Beryl believes, is that nobody feels judged. ‘It isn’t school,’ she says. ‘There’s no uniform and no register. There’s a lot of noise. The children see adults doing ordinary things, folding sheets, chatting, waiting, and they relax. And the parents can sit right next to them and see what they’re learning.’ Several parents, she adds, have started to join in, and one father now comes on Thursdays to practise his own reading.
Not everything is perfect. The table wobbles. When the big dryers are running, it is hard to hear yourself think. And on Mondays, the busiest washing day, children sometimes end up working on top of the folding counter. Nobody seems to mind. ‘We’ve had worse classrooms,’ Beryl says drily. ‘At least this one smells nice.’
Dev has been offered money by two businesses to move the club into a proper room. He has turned them both down, politely. ‘The magic is that it’s here,’ he says, waving at the machines, the steamed-up windows and the children bent over their books. ‘You come to wash your clothes and you leave with your homework done. Where else does that happen?’
The homework club at the Bubbles launderette is described as a surprising success. How does the writer try to show this?
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