Clarissa Farr - The Making of Her - Why School Matters

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.

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 in autumn, two-thirds of the way through the calendar year, as its beginning. Children are no longer employed in the fields during the summer months gathering in the harvest, yet the academic year still starts here. The long annual summer holiday in July seems at first a release from the remorselessness of the school year. But all too soon for children set free, the axis turns and the new term looms. Even now after so many years I feel a certain habitual apprehension at this time – will all go well with those first few days? Going back to school is a bit like getting out for that morning run: the thought of it is the worst bit – once you’ve done it you remember how you enjoy it and, each year, there is a moment to begin again. Japanese children return to school in April, when the spring cherry blossom offers the most natural sign of new beginnings. Different traditions but the same effect: a page turned and a fresh start.

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.