Susan Goes to Sompting

Veteran tennis commentator Peter West takes us on a journey around a boarding school for disabled children.

Sompting Abbey was a boarding school providing respite for disabled children's families in the 1960s. Although the language around disability is clearly dated, the tone of the film is quite enlightened for its times - Susan generally attends a mainstream day school but goes to boarding school to give her parents a break. This was unusual for its day, when the inclusion of disabled schoolchildren wasn't routinely considered.

The Invalid Children's Aid Association who commissioned this film began as a Victorian philanthropic charity. It still exists and is now renamed I Can, and more recently did pioneering work on the diagnosis of dyslexia.