About the Author

While a teenager in Merseyside in the early 1960s, Pete McDonald took up hillwalking and rock climbing. In 1968 he worked as a temporary instructor at a residential centre in the Lake District. This opening led in 1976 to a permanent job as an instructor at White Hall Centre, where he spent sixteen years. In 1992 he emigrated to New Zealand, where he divided his time into roughly equal portions of fatherhood, teaching, writing and cycling.

Reviews

Extract from a review by Tim Jepson in The Professional Mountaineer, no. 22 (Summer 2018), p. 40.The Story of White Hall Centre is long, 700+ pages long, dealing comprehensively with complex issues in forensic detail ... Indeed, I could not identify one event of relevance to outdoor education in Britain that had been omitted or skimmed over as part of the White Hall story ...It is almost certainly the case that had White Hall never existed, Outdoor Education in the UK would still have developed elsewhere on our islands, reaching similar outcomes by a parallel path. But as The Story of White Hall Centre clearly testifies, it was the White Hall Centre which pioneered the child-centred approach to outdoor education which has now served schools and pupils so well for nearly seventy years. This is a story which needed to be written down, not just for its own sake, but to celebrate all those centres, many now closed, and all those teachers who have devoted time, energy and enthusiasm to giving young people opportunities to experience living adventurously in natural environments.