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, which commissioned this film, began as a Victorian philanthropic charity. Now renamed I Can, it still exists and more recently did pioneering work on the diagnosis of dyslexia.