Belle Rennie

By this time her family were living in the New Forest and her parents agreed to adopt the child to ensure that no one thought she was Belle's natural daughter.

She visited the Montessori Institute in Italy, and she decided to organise the first Conference of the New Ideals in Education to discuss these ideas in 1912.

[1] In 1914 she was at Runton for another Conference of the New Ideals in Education where she heard Lillian Daphne de Lissa who was a keynote speaker who had created the Kindergarten Union of Western Australia.

Rennie took the lead on the idea, and she persuaded the Board of Education to give accreditation to her new Gipsy Hill College.

[1] This would lead to the Gipsy Hill College in South London,[1] which gathered 14 well educated and mature students to pay £54 a year to be the first trained in October 1917.

The basic idea was that there should be a series of structured tasks for the child that in total contributed to a broad curriculum.