At Dunwich, a lovely, desolate place on the Suffolk coast, you are close to the unmarked site of the first recorded school in England, founded by the sixth-century Irish monk Furseus. The Romans were here before him in what was then a very busy part of the world. By the ninth century, Dunwich was an important port, one of the six biggest towns in the land. When the Normans arrived, the Suffolk coast and hinterlands were the most densely populated area of Britain.

Erosion did for Dunwich, and industrialisation led to the decline of Suffolk’s wool empire - but its splendour can still be seen today, from the church in picturesque Lavenham to the country parks that decorate the county.

Suffolk has been growing again - at a rate of 4,000 a year in the 1980s, 3,000 latterly. Since 1980 it has seen 70,000 new jobs. The container port at Felixstowe has been rebuilt and is still expanding - it is now the third largest port in Europe. The A14 (upgraded to near motorway standard from the former A45) has provided a fast link to the Midlands - so busy, it kept me awake at night on my journeys through the home of Constable, Gainsborough and Britten and, more latterly, PD James, Stephen Fry and Hank Wangford. Service and hi-tech industries have been drawn to the cheap housing, available sites and the lure that children can enjoy fresh air and good schools.

In December, the county received a glowing report from Ofsted. Mike Tomlinson, then the Chief Inspector, said: “Suffolk is an outstanding local education authority with many strengths.”

Top-grade GCSEs have risen from 39 per centnt in 1992 to 53 per cent last year with 56 per cent predicted this summer.

In 1999, Suffolk received beacon status for its school improvement work, and in March it received a second beacon award for its support for transition between schools. Inspectors hailed the county as a champion of the arts and recreation, and approved of its commitment to inclusion.

It is a telling measure of Suffolk’s success that no schools opted out when given the chance by the Conservatives in 1988. While in neighbouring Essex, 256 schools went the grant-maintained route, schools north of the Stour stayed loyal to an authority they felt was serving their needs. The Tories had controlled the county for ever - they lost power in 1993 to today’s ruling LabourLib-Dem coalition, but they were non-Thatcherite.

“Given the rural nature of the county and the distance between schools, it was not thought appropriate to deny parents real choice,” says Betty Milburn, the Conservative who today chairs the learning for life theme panel which scrutinises education policy and practice. She is the only opposition councillor in such a post - a sign, she feels, of the consensual nature of education politics in the county.

A lot of credit for that goes to Nina Alcock, the formidable chair of the education committee of the late 1980s, who insisted that money be channelled from other departments to fund schools.

When the Conservatives were ousted in 1993, the county council carried on very much as before. The real change in emphasis came in the early years: where the Tories looked to the voluntary sector to provide nurseries to support the statutory school system, the new Labour-Lib-Dem coalition began to build their own, helped by more Whitehall money.

“We decided to concentrate on the young end, building three nurseries a year to give every pupil as good a start as possible,” says Tony Lewis, the Labour cabinet member for lifelong learning. By next year, there will be universal provision for three-year-olds - although not all is statutory.

“Our other priority has been early intervention and inclusion because the evidence shows that it works. There are more exclusions at secondary level at an age when the children couldn’t care less - we want to catch them young.”

To that end, Suffolk has opened two referral units for pupils as young as three - in Lowestoft and Ipswich - and plans are afoot for a network of middle-school equivalents.

Suffolk has put a lot of time and energy into its parent partnerships that provide support for those who live with problem pupils.

Courses help parents to learn how to cope with bureaucracy, how to manage their own anger and frustration and develop strategies for getting the best out of the system for their children. Helplines have been set up to help all parents to overcome problems with handling their children’s school affairs.

“If children gohome to a parent who may have a slightly better knowledge of the techniques of dealing with their children’s behaviour, that will be as influential as anything done by the school,” says David Peachey, the director of education.

In an area with a lot of aspirant newcomers, it is surprising to find pockets of severe deprivation. According to the index of local deprivation kept by Whitehall, Lowestoft has wards that rank in the toughest 4 per cent in the country.

Someone explored this vein before the civil servants ran their measuring rules over the place. In 1967, Ronald Blythe chronicled the lives and hopes of a village community in Akenfield, a book that revealed the villagers’ varying expectations in a changing world.

Older villagers talked of a highly stratified society, where farmers marched into school to summon boys to work in the fields, where sheer hard work ground people down before their forties, where workers feared bad weather because it denied them wages.

“In such a society, you have low expectations in the community,” says Peachey. “Historically, there has been high employment and low wages. The adult population has been below average in terms of educational achievement and this generates down to the kids.

“This is a very important issue for us as an LEA. We need not just to work with schools, but to work with after-school and pre-school groups, to work with parents. We have a big adult basic skills section, whereas many authorities have lost that.”

Moira Humphreys, head of East Bergholt high school and chair of Suffolk’s Association of Secondary Headteachers, believes that what sets the authority apart is the emphasis on learning styles - indeed, this will be the theme of the association’s residential conference in July. “For a rural authority to be in the forefront of educational thinking shows the quality of the people we have here,” she says.

Behind bars

Every year, 800 pupils, parents, proud relatives and teachers from all over Suffolk fill the auditorium at the Maltings, Snape, that musical outpost built by Benjamin Britten, a composer who started a tradition of encouraging amateur musicians and young people.

This year’s opening number was unusual: 11 minutes of contemporary music and photography composed by pupils at Samuel Ward high school, Haverhill, and some of the most dangerous young criminals in the land from Hollesley Bay prison, 12 miles north of Ipswich.

It was a challenging piece, and one that surprised an audience expecting the usual diet of classical works by Suffolk’s accomplished orchestras, wind bands and choirs.

“The atmosphere was amazing,” says Jane Wright, Haverhill’s head of music. “There was silence when we finished. People didn’t know what to do. They were stunned.”

The piece sprang from a project at the prison. Aldeburgh Education, an arts charity, sent a photographer to work with young offenders aged 15 to 18 to produce an exhibition of their own work, shot inside the jail. Wright and Haverhill’s head of art, Beverley Foulkes, attended an open day at the prison and used the prisoners’ work as a springboard for their own pupils to work on music and photography. Two composers came in to share ideas with the music students, half of whom used conventional instruments while the other half worked with computers to manipulate sounds.

The Haverhill students had limited contact with the prisoners who were locked up in a secure unit 60 miles away, but one young offender came to Haverhill to talk about the exhibition and his life, and another four came to the rehearsal on the day of the Maltings concert.

“It was groundbreaking stuff,” says Philip Shaw, for 16 years in charge of schools music in Suffolk. Shaw is a Mancunian who speaks with passion and great loyalty about the quality of life and the artistic community that he has found in his adopted home.

“There is no trace of complacency,” he says. “The quality of our pastoral care came out in the Ofsted report. We’re a first-name service and we all rely on each other. It’s good to be in such a team.”

And he is grateful to Benjamin Britten for building the Maltings in such a surprising setting. “The concerts we stage every year are moments to change our lives and those of our pupils. The place inspires a sense of awe. Such occasions are what moves the spiritual heartbeat.”

Money mission

In the past week or so, nine new staff have started work on Suffolk’s education finance team. Their job is to visit schools giving advice on budgets. There is obviously a demand for such individualised attention because the raison d’etre for the service was that schools were willing to pay for it.

“We think this is likely to grow,” says Carole Murton, the finance officer for Suffolk’s western area, based in Bury St Edmunds.

Four years ago, she was working in a local school managing the budget, but she moved to the education office to help develop a spreadsheet that all schools can use to manage their finances more easily.

Those four years have seen tremendous change in the relationship between schools and county hall: “The emphasis then was on us policing schools and getting back comments on the information schools had provided us with,” she says. “Today, we work with them, analysing their statistics to help them improve standards. We want schools to get the best possible value for money.

“The culture of the LEA used to be, ‘We know best’, but today it is, ‘How can we work with you?’ ” But Murton has not forgotten the difficulties faced by those running school offices.

“The problem is that they often have to be a jack of all trades. They have to interrupt calculations to give first aid to a pupil or welcome a visitor. Our job is to help people who are handling complex tasks under such pressures.”

The other task faced by the finance team is training heads and governors so that they can work out the best spending strategies.

“We lay out the training handbooks so that they match the spreadsheet software - this helps to make things visually clearer,” she says.

“Heads and governors do not necessarily have the skills to do the forward planning. You need to have clear plans for money you’re holding in reserve. It’s no good schools reacting to money they get from the Government as a surprise - they need to fit it into an existing plan.”

Why Percy had to go

On the wall of Charsfield school, a motto describes the head’s attitude to risk: “You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.”

Jacqui Lomas joined the school from a deputy headship in Felixstowe in January 2001 when the Charsfield roll was 37. Sixteen months later, it stands at 52 and is expected to be 57 by September as her impact has helped the local community to rediscover their faith in the village school.

“With a school this size, no year is the same,” she says. “We’ve only got four pupils in Year 6, so results pivot on individual performance. Last year, we had 11 - 70 per cent of them got Level 5 for science, with 100 per cent Levels 4s.”

The advantage of being so small is that staff can afford to be creative and experiment to produce better results.

“If you take a risk and it doesn’t work, it’s easy to pull the reins in quickly,” she says.

Charsfield is the real name for Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield, the village where he interviewed people from all walks of life to portray the second agricultural revolution that was changing 1960s England.

Daphne Ellington, an assistant teacher at the school in 1967, commented on the local people’s reactions to education: “There is something treasonable about a child who does well. A market gardener I know, who is now about 20, is a lonely person because he went to grammar school - and the village women say: ‘It didn’t get him far, did it? All that schooling and he’s still on the land!’ ” The day I arrive at Charsfield, Jacqui Lomas is reading “How Do They Walk on Hot Sand?”, a new booklet produced by Suffolk on teachers’ questioning techniques. She is hoping to distil the contents of the booklet for her staff. She knows that many of today’s parents have high expectations and it is up to her to deliver.

One survivor of Ronald Blythe’s day still lives in the village. Percy Mapperley was until recently on the payroll of the school as caretaker and oddjob man - until it was discovered that he was 75. He had to be told to stop because he was too old to insure. Percy replied: “The money doesn’t worry me - I just enjoy the work and would do it for nothing anyway.”

Operation recovery

Suffolk is full of surprises. Who would expect to find an engineering works on the edge of the heathland near the coast? It was in Leiston in 1778 that Richard Garrett, the first of five Richard Garretts, started his agricultural manufacturing works that grew into producing heavier machinery - from traction engines to buses and then laundromats. It was so big that by the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851, Richard III sailed two schooners from Suffolk to moor at Millbank so that his 300 workers could attend the spectacle at Crystal Palace.

That imaginative spirit lives on today. Garretts, which folded in 1980, still provides two governors for Leiston high school, which lies in the shadow of the nuclear power stations at Sizewell.

Four years ago, the school was struggling. Nigel English, head of the Denes high school in Lowestoft, was brought in as a trouble-shooting head who would see the school through a difficult period. His deputy from the Denes, Sean O’Neill, got the permanent job, and the two men planned Leiston’s recovery.

Today, the school roll is up from 545 then to 700 in September. Leiston has won specialist school status for design and technology, exam results have recovered from 38 per cent of top grade GCSEs to 64 per cent, and it has been named among the most improving schools in the country.

O’Neill sees the story as success on three levels: for himself and his staff - eight teachers left last year for promotion, three of them to become deputy heads, and he has another three taking the NPQH to prepare for headship; for the school and the local community - “The youngsters’ confidence is soaring and the town has new faith in us. Sizewell has just donated a mini-bus for the school, invaluable in a rural area”; and for Suffolk - a second phase of building starts this month, reflecting the expansion that consolidates the school’s success.

“The authority is a real support, he says. “Headship is a lonely job. You’ve got to have someone to talk to. I couldn’t have done what’s been achieved here on my own.”

Leiston’s other claim to fame is that nearby lies AS Neill’s progressive school at Summerhill. In fact, Leiston shares a Japanese teacher with Summerhill. Last year, all her students passed GCSE, gaining all As and Bs.

“Schools are dynamic places,” says O’Neill. “Sometimes it seems like a maelstrom, but it’s our job to move things forward.”

Homework,Miss?

Liz Depper is one of a new model of advisory teachers. She has a desk at the local teachers’ centre but regularly works from home. Under a new trial scheme, she has a second phone line installed at home, an internet connection is to follow, and a copierfaxscanner all in one to connect to her laptop. She spends two days a week at home.

“It’s the way things are going,” says Roger Loose, the senior adviser for school improvement. “People work better from home and it means that ultimately we will save on office space.”

Ms Depper has just published a booklet to complete a series of four that Suffolk has produced, on thinking and learning skills. “How Do They Walk On Hot Sand?” examines the way teachers ask questions and suggests various ways in which their techniques might be improved.

“Quite often, if teachers were to rejig the same question to challenge the student, they would get a better response,” she says.

Her book and the other three in the series are part of a shift that Roger Loose believes will bring about the next step-change in learning in schools.

“It will come from much more detailed research feedback into the interaction between teacher and pupils, brain research, emotional intelligence, thinking skills, assessment for learning - all these will make a huge impact on schools and that’s where our staff have been directing their energy,” says Mr Loose.

Classroom Assessment, How Am I Doing, Learning and Teaching and How Do They Walk On Hot Sand? are all available from Suffolk Advisory Service, St Andrew House, County Hall, Ipswich IP4 1L