It was one of the books I hadn’t read before so it was news to me, I have just spent far too long googling to work out which book it was and found this.
“Another device that Brent-Dyer uses to illustrate her opinions about modern teaching methods is the invention of another Chalet School, run on very different lines. It makes its first appearance in The Wrong Chalet School (1952), when a pupil tells a new girl:
last year they had a new Head and she has the maddest ideas. She believes in you learning what you like and when you like. It sounds very nice, but I think it must be an awfully untidy way of doing things. I'd a lot rather do as we do and have time-tables. (Brent-Dyer, 1952a, p11)
In a later book, Bride Leads the Chalet School (1953), the two schools merge and the results of these teaching methods are demonstrated for the readers.
it was found that, with very few exceptions, the girls from the Tanswick school were a good year behind their contemporaries on the Island. Free discipline does not make for hard work unless the pupils are born students and the general tone of the Tanswick school had not made for that. (Brent-Dyer, 1953a, p82)
Given her attacks on both old-fashioned and modern teaching methods, it is likely that Brent-Dyer agreed with headmistress Miss Annersley when Miss Wilson claimed that "There's quite a lot to be said for some of the old-fashioned methods of teaching, you know." Miss Annersley replies: "I believe in mingling the old and the new - making the best of both, in fact." (Brent-Dyer, 1949, p386).“