Ena May Neill

Ena May Neill (, formerly Ena May Wood; 29 May 1910 – 26 October 1997) was a British head teacher at Summerhill School. She managed the school for years on behalf of the founder, A. S. Neill, before she became the head officially in 1973.

Background Neill was born in 1910 in West Malling. Her parents were Ethel Sophie May and Ernest George Wooff. Her father worked for a grocer. She began training as a nurse but abandoned that career to marry a commercial artist, Bill (William Albert) Wood. The marriage did not last and their son, Peter, was sent to board at Summerhill School.

After his first wife's death, Wooff married the school's founder, A. S. Neill on 14 April 1945. He was synonymous with Summerhill, the school famous since the 1920s for its unconventional approach, as being, for example, a "free" school where pupils could optionally attend classes.

One of the Neills' first tasks after their marriage in 1945, since the war had ended, was to move the school back from Wales to its former site in Leiston, where it had been since 1927. The school had been used as an army training camp, and its buildings were not left in a fit state to function as a school. They needed extensive restoration and refurbishment.

Ena Neill had overseen many aspects of running the school, gathering the necessary managerial skills as she went; She was succeeded by her daughter Zoe Readhead, her and A. S. Neill's only child together. She had been born to the couple in 1946 and had attended the school as a student. Readhead explained that although her father had the reputation of being a benign leader, it was her mother who established a level of order in the school.