The Making of Her: Why School Matters

Even where things appear to go smoothly from the outside not every child settles into a new school easily. As the one-time head of a boarding school, I know something about homesickness, that most physical feeling, creating a dull ache in the middle of you as if there is a gap there, exactly the shape that home and all that is familiar should be. It can be felt by children in day schools just as fiercely – a school day when you feel left out or lonely or overwhelmed can seem to last forever. But for many, just like my own period of unhappiness, it almost always passes. At Queenswood I can recall only one girl out of the many hundreds of boarders whose homesickness seemed to have no cure, and this had more to do with anxieties about an unstable home situation than with being at school. While not all children will necessarily adapt to and enjoy boarding, parents who are sympathetic listeners while staying positive about the new experience and waiting for time to do its work are likely to see their child settle happily. I’ve often smiled to myself on hearing older girls recalling their own difficult initial experiences, as a way of helping younger pupils through those early weeks. Self-possessed young women now, and with the wisdom of experience, they had the air of having left such worries far behind.

For many children, the start of senior school is exciting. There might be apprehension at first, but the expectation of a new beginning soon takes over. There is so much to learn: new friends to make, new teachers to meet, new habits and traditions to learn about. All part of becoming a member of this new community. To promote the building of confidence, at St Paul’s we deliberately kept our forms or tutor groups small, around twelve (two joined together made a teaching group) so that it would be easier for the children to make friends quickly and get to know their pastoral or home-room tutor. As a London school with a scattered catchment area, we also grouped the children as much as possible by geography, so that you would be likely to find two or three girls in your group who lived reasonably close. Over the first few weeks, there would be careful attention paid to helping everyone settle in and make friends, including a much anticipated one-day visit to an outdoor activity centre, with team-building exercises and plenty of opportunity to get extremely wet and muddy, which the staff looked forward to nearly as much (or so they claimed afterwards …) By half term, most would feel completely at home in their new school.

It isn’t just the pupils who have to adapt, however. Their parents face challenges too. If you are a parent on the brink of seeing your child move to secondary school, you may well have conflicting emotions: excitement at the new opportunities opening up mixed with fear that you will suddenly feel redundant and pushed away. All those years of having fragile artwork and sticky cookery pressed into your hands at the school gates, of checking satchels for squashed letters about the next school trip or dress-up day, of hearing in detail what Miss Eyelash said about hedgehogs – all this is about to give way to a new, more grown-up experience for your child, and also for you. If for pupils it’s about fitting in, for mum and dad it’s about building trust in the school and letting go, especially when the children leave the normally smaller and cosier environment of their prep or primary school and, at age eleven, transfer to senior school. Parents wonder what their role will be, now that the children no longer seem eager to share every detail of their day, but look past the too-familiar face at the school gate to something or someone more interesting, answering the eager question ‘So what did you do today?’ with a shrug of the shoulders and that familiar adolescent brush-off: ‘Oh, stuff’.

For the leadership team at the school, carefully building a relationship not just with the new pupil but also with their parents is vital, for it’s the school which is the newcomer in this triangular relationship. Schools are used to doing the talking – to setting out the expectations – and this is important; but first, establishing the relationship with a family means being ready to listen and learn, demonstrating trust in and respect for parents’ knowledge and experience by encouraging them to share as much as possible about their child. Almost all parents secretly believe (some not so secretly) that their own children are the most wonderful young people in the world. I know mine are. Parents love any opportunity to talk about these remarkable individuals they have created and nurtured. What topic could possibly be of greater interest? A parent’s view of their child is at once the most informed and also the most subjective, so as new families joined St Paul’s, I would invite the parents to write me a letter about their daughter. Note this was to be a letter: the importance of the subject matter meant this was going to be something you would take time to think about, not a form to be filled in hurriedly or a dashed-off email (even though some would inevitably arrive electronically). I asked parents simply to tell me as much as they could about their daughter’s personality and interests, about the family and about any unusual experiences she might have had that it would be useful for us to know about. These might be special triumphs or achievements (many parents delighted in providing a long list of those) and equally, they might be difficult life events; it would all help us understand her better. Most parents appeared thoroughly to enjoy the process and put great thought into it: each new pupil came alive on the page in the voice of her mother or father: ‘We came to parenthood late and Hattie has continued to amaze and astonish us since the day she was born. She cannot wait to start senior school’, or ‘Lola has a very strong sense of right and wrong and finds it hard to stand by and watch any unkindness amongst other children’, or ‘Maisie has a very close relationship with her grandmother and they love making up stories together; she is a quiet child and is therefore somewhat apprehensive about being at a larger school’, or occasionally: ‘We sometimes feel quite exhausted after a weekend with Zainab. She is looking forward to interviewing her new teachers for the magazine she has recently started writing in her bedroom.’ And so on. Sometimes I learned about difficulties, perhaps of loss or separation, that these not-quite-eleven-year-olds had already weathered. How important for us to have this context, to understand them better as we took charge of their education and care. The letters gave parents at the outset an unhurried and respected voice as well as underlining the importance we attached to their special, uniquely experienced perspective. Of course, they also gave insight into the dynamics of families and their values and what circumstances we might be engaging with as time went on: families separated across the world because of work commitments perhaps, families where there was only one parent or sometimes families caring for a sibling with disability or an elderly grandparent. Reading these letters, filled with unashamedly partisan love and with hopes and aspirations for a daughter’s future, I hoped the parents would keep copies, to read again to their daughter as she left school in seven years’ time. ‘Tell me about your daughter’ was perhaps the most powerful conversation opener I ever employed, and it was where each individual girl’s story at senior school would begin.

Having invited them to write those important letters, during our welcome tea party I would explain to the crowd of slightly apprehensive new parents that we would be encouraging the girls’ independence right from the start. So soon? their faces said. My own mother’s maxim was that as a good parent you should make your child independent of you ‘as early as possible’ and this very practical and sound advice, especially for working mothers, I have always kept in mind. As parents, they would not be told every little thing, because this was a stage where the pupils would be encouraged to take responsibility for themselves and sort out some of their own challenges. There are many things for the girls to adjust to on starting life in a new, bigger school, with more pupils and teachers, more subjects to get used to and a totally new way of doing things, I would tell them. But we would all be there to help. For example, if as a pupil you are too busy attending lots of exciting after-school clubs to get your homework done (a very familiar problem to many an eager new eleven-year-old) this is a thing to talk to your tutor about. You don’t need to rush to involve your mother or father. At this I would see the parents looking hesitant: surely it was up to them to know everything, to smooth away all the snowdrifts blocking their path? No, I would say firmly. Education is about learning to solve problems for yourself, even though that adjustment and releasing of parental control is very hard.

For us parents, this learning to let go is a lifelong counter-intuitive lesson (I’m still working on it and my children are in their early twenties) and we are greatly helped in the adjustment if, at the secondary stage, the school makes the effort to forge an effective and trusting relationship with us. As a head I was always aware that mutual trust could only be built up over time, but the school needed to make clear that this was a priority. Reminding parents that as a parent myself I was not unaware of the adjustment they were having to make, at that same welcome tea party I would talk about the exciting journey we were embarking on together, entering into partnership in the care and education of their children, and how important it was that we established good channels of communication – and then kept them open. During your daughter’s time with us there will be ups and downs, I warned lightly. The teenage years are coming! If you are having difficulty adjusting to that bored sigh when you ask what your daughter did at school, wait until you are getting the adolescent eye roll accompanied by ‘Hello …?’ when you make some well-intentioned but hopelessly inept remark about modern social mores or popular culture.

School and home need to work together – or at least in trusting partnership. With long experience of teenagers, we have dealt with most things: absenteeism, amnesia about homework deadlines, absconding, arson … one could go on through the alphabet but you get my point. We try always to operate from the principle that the school is a place to learn about boundaries but wherever possible to have the chance to start again and do better. But of course we know that having heard your daughter’s own account of events, you may not necessarily always see things as we do. If as parents you are unhappy about the way we handle something, try not to talk about the school critically in front of your daughter at home, but come and talk to me or your daughter’s tutor. Children are naturally loyal – both to their school, and to their parents. The girl who has heard her parents running the school down at home cannot then look her headmistress in the eye: an invisible line has been crossed; something is wrong in her world. I have seen this on a few occasions and it always saddens me to see the girl removed from that happy circle of security and unsure of the way back. We need to build up, to see her through good times and bad, that precious, triangular relationship of trust and respect between pupil, parents and school. This is incredibly important to the security and stability of your daughter. Once it has been damaged, it can be very difficult to repair. If you promise not to criticise us at home, I would end with a wry smile, I promise I will not say to your daughter: ‘I hear your mother has been complaining again, Anya!’ If the parents felt they had had a talk from the headmistress, well, they had. Better that than have communication breakdown later when, inevitably, it would be the girl who suffered.

So how to be a good ‘new’ parent? Remember that whatever school meant to you, your child is writing her own story. Get used to the fact that you will not know everything: be sure to forge a good relationship with your child’s most important adult at school – probably the tutor – which means not expecting daily personal bulletins on progress, but a relationship of trust where you would feel comfortable to be in touch if you had a genuine concern or worry. Respect the fact that your child will choose her own friends, develop her own opinions and explore her own interests: this is her education after all … Encourage and enjoy her growing independence, for just as she develops her separate life from you, just as surely she will want, in her own time, to share parts of it too.

In thinking about ourselves as former pupils and now as parents, projecting our own memories of school onto the fresh experience of our children, we have always to keep in mind that the world today is very different from the world in which we grew up ourselves. It sounds so obvious. The generation growing up in schools today – sometimes called Generation Z or the post-millennial generation – have for one thing never known a world without the internet, the iPhone and the iPad. Using technology comes naturally to them and they are used to the freedoms it brings: the ability to find out information instantly, the ability to connect with others unlimited by time and space and the ability to create virtual identities which appear to be untrammelled by the responsibilities of normal life. In cities especially, children tend to be both less connected to their immediate communities and less interested in national politics while at the same time being better informed about the macro, global problems of inequality, poverty and climate change. Following the financial crisis of 2008 and the revaluation of financial power, together with the loss of respect for certain industries such as banking, there is now a more general questioning of the authority of institutions. This generation does not find virtue in patience; with the answer to anything a screen touch away, students value speed over accuracy. However, while they may be able to source information very fast, they are less equipped to discriminate as to whether sources are trustworthy. When you take a book out of the school library, you pretty much know it is worth reading or it wouldn’t be there. Look up something online and you don’t necessarily have that assurance. The prevalence of mental ill health in young people points amongst other things to the darker side of the fast-moving and technological world they inhabit, and the sense of being alone which prevails within the virtual world of cyber connectivity. All that said, Generation Z are fired with a great sense of social responsibility: they grasp the fact that if the species is to survive, they will need to turn a competitive world in which wealth is more and more unequally distributed into a collaborative one where shrinking natural resources are shared. Many opt to volunteer their time in projects which have social benefits either at home or abroad (almost every girl in the top year was doing this by the time I left St Paul’s) and they look forward to careers which will be more varied and less linear than those their parents have experienced. (I will return to specific aspects of this wider context and the Generation Z mindset in later chapters.) The point to emphasise here is that the prevailing characteristic which they and therefore schools need to grapple with is a climate of much greater uncertainty and unpredictability. This provides challenge and opportunity and we have to prepare them for both. To lead fulfilled lives and contribute to society they will need more than their natural optimism and enviably short memory for things that went wrong. They will need creativity and imagination, the ability to work with others and to apply their knowledge in new situations, and they will also need resilience and grit. Increasingly therefore, these are qualities we are actively addressing in our schools.

At the start of the year, for the school itself, with all the hopes and aspirations of so many people to meet and manage, creating the make-believe of a beginning offers special challenges – for leadership and for teamwork. I often thought of the process in terms of flying a large, fully loaded passenger aircraft. As the head, you’re the pilot: you climb aboard, settle into your seat and check the controls, remove your peaked cap and taxi down the runway. The great machine, loaded with its freight of people, luggage and expectations, gathers speed, and then by a miracle of engineering, with much shuddering and thanks to laws of physics that few understand, the whole thing climbs into the skies and becomes airborne. At St Paul’s, with almost 250 staff and over 740 pupils, that point came when the first staff meeting, the first assembly, and the arrival and induction of new staff and pupils were all comfortably ticked off. At last I would put away my file with its dividers marked ‘beginning of school year’ and think to myself: okay, so far so good. Now we climb to cruising altitude.

Leaders need to tell stories, and good stories have a beginning that makes you want to read on. The start of a new academic year provides various opportunities as a head for using a public forum – of which the school assembly is one example – to set the tone and mood, and engage everyone with excitement for the challenges ahead. That’s how you would speak to the girls, but then there are the staff to think about. In speaking to any large audience it’s important that each person feels you are speaking directly to them. Keeping the analogy of the story in mind, everyone listening to you is a character in the adventure you are about to begin and great things are only achieved when teams of people work together, each person seeing what it is that they (and only they) can contribute to the whole. I made sure that the opening staff meeting of the year was attended by everyone – not only teachers, but the cleaning and catering staff, business managers, those who worked in the offices, together with technicians and groundsmen too – we were one team, all contributing to the unfolding story of one school.

There was always a lively receptivity at that meeting and I was often struck how after the much-needed summer break everyone looked so startlingly young and refreshed. The last time we were all together in June, people were utterly exhausted: now they had bright eyes and outdoor faces, ready for anything. News of summer projects flowed; particularly enjoyable were the pithy accounts of school trips: ‘We made only a passing visit to the accident and emergency department at the hospital in Rome this year’, or ‘The ground staff at Heathrow were pleasantly surprised that we had only to make one dash back through the airport to retrieve a passport from the seat pocket.’ The publication of public exam results (consistently excellent at St Paul’s and therefore a highlight of this meeting, though not vaunted externally) meant thanks to everyone: if you taught or fed the pupils, or mended their computers or cleaned their classrooms, you shared that success. The school took the decision some years ago to withdraw from the regular round of published league tables to take the emphasis away from this crude measure of educational quality, but it didn’t stop us enjoying privately working out where we would have been placed had we submitted our data and the director of studies would enjoy regaling us with our theoretical placing amongst our keenest competitors. Whoever you were, this was your moment to feel proud of being part of the success story. After an hour, people would edge along the rows of cinema-style chairs to head for coffee in the staffroom, feeling surprisingly good: valued, happy to be back, ready for all that the term might bring.

The next day, there was the first assembly of the school year, which was my opportunity to welcome those who were new. Standing at the carved wooden lectern in the centre of the stage in Gerald Horsley’s Great Hall, this was a new beginning for everyone, I would remind them. For the girls new to the school, seated cross-legged on the shiny floorboards at the very front of the hall in clothes picked out with more care than they ever would be again, it marked the start of life as a Paulina and all that meant in terms of pride and identity. For new staff, the beginning of a fresh chapter in their career; and for other students, a shift in their position in the seven-year narrative of school life. How immensely grown up it must feel, to be twelve and entering the ‘UIV’, (Upper IV – the equivalent of year 8 at St Paul’s) and not to be a MIV (Middle IV – year 7) any more, with the senior girls looking at you fondly as if you were a small fluffy animal. How significant to be entering the VI (year 11) and know that you were in the run-up to GCSE just a few months away. Or even more exciting, to have entered the Senior School (sixth form) with the privilege of sitting on the red upholstered seats on the balcony of the hall, a position affording you a critical view of events below and one to which you had been aspiring for a full five years.

It was also an important moment to begin setting the tone and values for the new pupils, and to begin on some of the themes for modern life. What did it mean to have arrived at St Paul’s? I would often use a recent event as a parallel story. In September 2008, for example, the Beijing Olympics provided the perfect subject. Here’s what I said to the girls that morning:

I’m speaking especially to those of you who are new Paulinas and I hope the rest of you will find some echoes in what I’m saying. We’re probably all feeling a bit uncomfortable this morning: we’ve had to get up earlier; we’ve abandoned our flip-flops for proper shoes, the floor of the hall is every bit as hard as we remembered although it is a bit shinier (thank you Mr Radford and maintenance) and the summer holidays are rapidly receding.

Those of you who are new are in unfamiliar surroundings – which is a bit daunting. What you’ll gradually do, starting today, is find your place within this new world of school. There will be questions in your mind: how do I find my way around? Who will my friends be? How will I fit in with my class and my year group? Will the work be hard? How will I find the music rooms for my piano lesson? Probably all of us remember asking those questions on the first day and now wonder why we worried about them.

St Paul’s will encourage you to feel at home and also help you become independent. We’ll encourage you to think for yourself, to develop and test your opinions, to pursue your own interests. Most people find the school a very open, friendly and supportive place. I hope you’ll find it so too. Those of you who are old hands, please lend the newcomers all the help you can.

I hope you’ve all had a great holiday. Whatever you have been doing over the past few weeks, most of you will have watched some of the Olympic Games happening in Beijing. I know some of you were lucky enough to go out to China to watch. If you’ve been following, you will know that:

• 204 countries took part

• 10,500 athletes competed in twenty-eight sports ranging from athletics to BMX cycling and beach volleyball

• Team GB won nineteen gold medals, the most since a hundred years ago when the games were here in London at White City.

We all have a natural desire to strive for success, but even for Olympic athletes, such success does not come easily. In swimming, for example, the Dutch athlete Marten Van Der Weijden, who won the open water event, was six years ago in hospital with leukaemia. He said: ‘My illness taught me to think step by step, to think about the next hour, to be patient – the same strategy I chose here to take my moment, to take the lead.’ That was a truly inspirational win. Natalie du Toit, of South Africa, a top-flight international swimmer who lost a leg in a motorcycle accident in 2001, competed in the same event. She said: ‘I want to do everything on merit – this is not just a free ride.’ And things did not always come easily either to Michael Phelps, USA, who won eight gold medals (the greatest number ever in a single Olympics). He had struggled at nursery school with attention deficit disorder.

So, whether you were supporting Team GB, or another country’s athletes, you couldn’t fail to be aware of the sheer hard work, the hope and ambition; the connection between effort and excellence. Simon Barnes, writing in The Times, said of the British team that they were not just winning gold medals, but they were ‘setting the agenda for excellence’. Perhaps as we look forward to the year ahead, we can – in our own way – do that too.