This book is for anyone who has been to school. I invite you to go back in time to that unique and personal world, to walk the academic year with me and to reconnect in memory with the teachers, places and habits that were yours. This isn’t meant as therapy, you understand: how would I presume to offer that? I have been lucky: happy for the most part at school in Somerset (I’ve expunged the memory of diving into the freezing outdoor pool in April) and apart from the equally icy coldness of the billowing, black-clad nuns at my convent primary school, my school days were far from traumatic. But whatever our recollection of school, to revisit that impressionable time is to understand better who we have become and why. And the more we can turn our education to good account in the present, the more we can help our children, whose adult lives will be so different from ours, to do the same.
School came to mean something different when I became a teacher – not through a high-minded desire to serve the next generation but because, while putting the finishing touches to my MA dissertation, I was, somewhat pretentiously, obsessed by the novels of Henry James. ‘Live! … Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to,’ he writes in The Ambassadors – and I wanted to do so. This meant finding an excuse to go on reading James while being paid and, if possible, persuading my students of the unrivalled brilliance of these works. In practice as a teacher I rarely touched on his labyrinthine novels – most of my pupils would have been escaping through the doors (or windows) before I reached the end of the first, attenuated, periodic, excruciatingly Jamesian sentence. Instead, I was surprised to find I liked the company of my students for its own sake: their quick-wittedness, their irreverence, their refusal to be impressed.
I began my working life in the ordered world of Farnborough Sixth-Form College. The students were barely younger than I was and teaching Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale as a twenty-two-year-old young woman to a class peppered with eighteen-year-old boys provided challenges I hadn’t been trained for (no, they might not kiss me – not even once – at the end of term). I was able to learn some of the craft of teaching with A-level students who had chosen their subjects and were eager to learn. This was not a given in all classrooms, as I found out later when I moved from this ambrosial world to the spin-dryer that was Filton High School in Bristol, a city comprehensive. There it was period eight, last of the day, with a bottom-set class of adolescents, that everyone dreaded, but I learned there everything I know about classroom control and how to discipline a rowdy room through timing and silence.
Three years in the Far East followed as I finally shed my West Country tethers, arriving at Sha Tin College in glittering, clattering Hong Kong. When the prospect of becoming a gin-and-tonic-swilling expat palled, I returned to the gloomier skies of England’s heart and Leicester Grammar School, where at the time, Richard III was still safely buried under a city centre car park. There I began my life in senior management, with the monitoring of skirt lengths, the removal of nail varnish and timetabling in my wide-ranging portfolio. I moved into girls’ education (much easier for an ambitious woman wanting to get to the top than staying with co-education, at that time) as deputy head at my mother’s old school, Queenswood in Hertfordshire, in 1992. When the headmistress, Audrey Butler, retired four years later, I was chosen to succeed her. My father, rarely a man to waste words on optimistic sentiment, beamed with pride: his girl was obviously as bossy as he was – what joy! Ten years followed, during which I also married and had two children, before the chance of running the schools’ equivalent of Manchester United came up. Elizabeth Diggory was to retire from St Paul’s. The stars were aligned, the timing was perfect and I came to lead my first and only London day school in September 2006.
Drawing upon my own experiences as a pupil, teacher, headmistress and mother, I have in mind as I write those who are parents of teenagers, particularly those bringing up girls. After twenty-five years in girls’ education, I have well-founded respect and admiration for the young women of this age group (though a few of them have almost driven me nuts) – with their optimism, their intelligence, their determination and their wonderful sense of humour. Whether or not the ‘girls’ school movement’, as it was once grandly called, survives – and that must be a question, despite the growing body of research defending the need for girls to be educated separately – there has to be continued attention paid to the education of girls, if the special talents and gifts they offer are to be brought out for the world’s greater benefit.
As a leader in education, seeing many common preoccupations across the sectors, I am also writing for anyone responsible for the work of others, where the task is to encourage a group of people to cohere behind a shared vision. Schools are exceptionally complex, with so many constituencies to read and keep happy: governors, staff, parents and students past, present and future, the general public, the government, the inspectorate and, for most independent schools while they remain charities, the Charity Commission. But the central elements of effective leadership are readily recognisable and transferable, so I offer observations from my own experience, including my mistakes, for the parallels others may smilingly draw with their own.
Finally, this book is for any person who wants simply to reflect on their own life, their opportunities and choices, and the unique path we each follow as we gradually make and remake ourselves: the inexorable process of becoming the person we are destined to be.
Back to school – ‘the make-believe of a beginning’
The bank holiday weekend is over, summer is waning and as the season turns, the soft, slanting afternoon light reminds us it’s time to be getting ready for the new term. For some weeks, vast electronic billboards looming over city roads have borne the cheerful exhortation ‘Back to School!’ The angelic, tousle-headed children, pictured wearing their Teflon-coated school trousers with improbably white shirts and artfully skewed ties, seem to think that none of us can wait for the holidays to be over. Real children, alert for any shopping opportunity, badger their parents for new stationery, with its cellophane-wrapped, freshly minted smell and brightly coloured promise: pristine pads of hole-punched paper, rainbow post-it notes, neat geometry sets, rulers, rubbers and writing equipment in every shape and colour. For them, the time soon comes to pack your bag, board the school bus, find your locker in the cloakroom and print your name neatly on a fresh exercise book. For parents, after the flurry of gathering everything, once the term starts, a little silence falls. And for the teachers and the head, the task is to get the whole glittering enterprise launched once again. As a new academic year begins, everyone has their own hopes and aspirations and perhaps some anxieties too: this is when the foundations are laid for the school life that unfolds, month by month, and which I will sketch through the pages of this book.
A book, a chapter, a school life: what does it mean to start something – and is a beginning ever truly that? ‘Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning,’ writes George Eliot, as the opening words of Daniel Deronda. Something in us needs that sense of starting afresh to give us purpose. We want to separate what has gone before from what is to come, to shape and construct the future. Perhaps it reflects our fundamental optimism – and nowhere is that felt more powerfully than in a school, where young people are looking to their future and all the possibilities it holds. With their ingrained temporal structure of a year divided into three terms, terms divided into weeks, weeks into the daily timetable, and each day into its lesson compartments, schools provide regular opportunities for that act of renewal. At the same time the annual starting point is odd: why September? If like me you have spent your life in education, you are hard-wired to see the month that ushers