The first day arrives and the school buildings that have been eerily quiet – only the noise of a distant drill from some maintenance work breaking the silence – are suddenly filling with voices. Younger children make their way through the school gates carrying their too-new rucksacks, eyeing the older ones who, oblivious, are nonchalantly removing earbuds. Parents, dismissed, wave goodbye and hesitate, feeling a mixture of anxiety and relief. Inside, teachers are already in their classrooms, noticeboards cleared, preparing for the arrival of their classes. As a young teacher, I would print up my long blue mark book with the names of the pupils in each of my classes on the left-hand side, the double spread of squared cream paper ready to receive the recorded marks that would build up like a secret code of letters and herringbone strokes across the page as the year wore on. A whole blueprint was contained in those thick, pristine pages: the yet-to-be-written history of your world, of your life as a teacher, and of the progress of pupils in your care.
What are your recollections of going back to school? It’s a question that often prompts strong reactions. Whether or not we enjoyed them at the time, our school days are formative: whatever our path in life, especially if we are parents contemplating the schooling of our own children or if we become professional teachers, our own experience of being a pupil is never far below the surface, inevitably colouring our views. However long ago it was, we have a reservoir of stored memories of our early lives and our time at school which can shed light on how we have developed into our adult selves. You might be surprised to find just how fresh those early memories are, once you invite them to the surface. Affection and a certain nostalgia may sweeten the picture, but all those injustices or near misses come straight back too. Sadly, some are seriously scarred by the memories, and it’s a pity that we hear so many more of those stories than the happier ones. Whatever it was like, it’s now a part of you.
Given how much we read about people who were miserable at school, I feel lucky that for me it was for the most part a happy experience. This has been continually influential in my work because I know, from first-hand experience, that there are few things so grounding and reassuring to a child as feeling you truly belong to your school community. When school takes on that unforced comfortable familiarity, the buildings themselves, the favourite corners where you linger with your friends, the routes and corridors you traverse at full tilt (unless a teacher is coming), your lessons, the teachers themselves, your friends, the soundscape of bells and clatter, the smell of the polish even: these things make up your entire world. There is no sense of being in some anteroom, peering in from the sidelines of an adult world waiting for real life to begin. This is it and you are the centre of it. When pupils feel at home at school in this way, they are at their most naturally confident and this is when the best learning is done. As a head, I simply wanted every child to know that feeling; so creating the conditions for it informed everything.
Of course, there are always some children who find it more difficult to integrate, even though often they may very much want to belong. In a high-achieving intellectual environment (where you test for many things but not emotional intelligence) there are more pupils than you might think who, despite their prodigious gifts, find the social contact with others difficult. And there are always a few who stubbornly resist, at odds with their school, rejecting its values and authority. They will not allow their individuality to be diluted, to be lured into some institutional conformity and suffer agency capture! They would be the grit in the oyster. But over time, a little pearl would often secrete itself around these too. For on the whole, especially when joining a new school at age eleven, children don’t want to be different or to stand out; they want to be accepted, and the first few weeks are all about fitting in and becoming part of the tribe. Pupils learn to belong by watching, adapting and through myriad small adjustments that often go under adult radar. Their ‘pack’ is their form, or tutor group, and this is the unit in which they first find their feet.
The importance of helping new pupils feel secure and grounded in their year group was a priority for me as a head because of something that happened to me, no doubt from the best of intentions, when at school in my first senior school year.
I had joined my senior school, Sunny Hill (known more formally as Bruton School for Girls), set on a rolling green hilltop outside Bruton, Somerset, in 1968. Aged ten, I was placed in Miss Reed’s first-form class. The youngest children in the school, we were taught in a long wooden hut with a gabled roof and its own small garden, rickety windows and walls pockmarked by drawing pins where our pictures, stories and poems were proudly displayed. Miss Reed, a tiny person with the bright brown eyes of a mouse, had the appearance of someone who spent her weekends taking bracing walks along cliff paths. That first term I quickly made friends and felt both absorbed and stimulated by everything we did; it was one of the happiest of my school days. But then everything changed.
One morning at the start of the second term, Miss Reed called me up to her desk. ‘I’ve something to tell you, Clarissa,’ she said, eyes twinkling. ‘You’re being moved up a year. The work will be more stretching. And it’s also that you’re more mature than the others …’ Mature! What was that? My world had just fallen apart. When was I to start? Well, there was no time like the present: it would be at once. Miserably, I said goodbye to my friends and was escorted down unfamiliar corridors to the alien, too-bright world of my new form room, where at the desk next to mine a sturdy girl with a pale-brown fringe and sensible glasses called Margaret Morgan had been told to look after me. Margaret was politely kind, but after a few days she admitted one break-time how she was missing spending time with her best friend, Cecily Krasker, and gratefully went off to find her. Sitting alone on a wall, I hoped I didn’t look too conspicuous and longed for the bell to ring so that I could return to the anonymity of the class.
Untethered from the lovely security of Miss Reed’s class and my friends, I was lost. I dreaded the long lunch hours where I would drift around, trying to attach myself to one group of girls or another. They were kind enough, but nobody really wanted me: friendships had formed a year ago and this new, younger girl was an awkward thing. I felt childish next to these impossibly mature thirteen-year-olds who had started to wear bras and have periods. Once only interested in the fascinating world of discovery that was the first-form classroom, now I was ashamed of my failure to reach these very different milestones. At last, after much hinting, my mother did allow me to have a bra and there was a mortifying trip to the local outfitters, where she and the well-padded assistant exchanged amused glances as an infinitesimally small garment was selected. We bought two, neatly packed in cardboard boxes, like clothing for a doll. One on, one in the wash, the assistant said efficiently. The anxiously awaited arrival of my periods – a rite of passage in the lives of all young girls – came to me long after it had ceased to be a newsworthy matter to our class generally, accompanied by a silent relief that, alone in the bathroom at home, I shared with no one.
Children adapt and are often more resilient than we expect. I eventually settled in to the new class and by the following year, had made friends and was starting to enjoy academic work again. From that unnecessarily rocky start I went on to have six more happy years at the school. In my penultimate year, unlooked-for success was secured as a result of a chance meeting between my grandmother and the headmistress in a local tea shop. Miss Cumberlege (I will come back to her later), seeking no doubt to make polite conversation, said to my grandmother: ‘Clarissa seems to be doing very well at school …’ to which my grandmother replied magnificently: ‘Doing well? Clarissa could run an Empire!’ No doubt on the strength of this I was soon appointed one of the four head girls. So all ended well, but that early experience of being moved up always seemed a pointless emotional