Jan 22

Learning from the great women of this world: the humility of a local hero

At the weekend I attended the celebration dinner of the annual Student Leadership Conference run by the Alliance of Girls’ Schools (Australasia) – a fabulous 4 day conference in which Head Girls and their Deputies from girls’ schools in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Phillippines and further afield, including the US, are led through a journey of self-discovery and affirmation of their ability to lead themselves and their peers. The dinner – the first time I had attended, obviously – was held this year at the Women’s College at the University of Sydney, and the guest speaker was an amazingly modest woman who held the hall – all 160 girls plus numerous school principals and guests – in thrall.

Her name was Lynne Sawyers, and you can hear her story here, on YouTube, and read an interview with her here. She is (very) fast approaching her 70th birthday, but is still active in the role for which she was awarded the honour of Australia’s Local Hero 2012 – the role of foster parent. She and her husband have fostered more than 200 children over the past few decades, and her utter commitment to giving a better life to those in need shone through the words in her speech. She recognised, when her own youngest child was still a baby, that there were many children whose childhood was far less happy than was hers as a child, and she resolved to do something about it. Sometimes children stayed with her for a few days, sometimes for several years. She talked about them with pride but also with a modesty about her role that underplayed her crucial influence on the life of these young people.

Not all children have the benefit of a stable family background; even those who do can still suffer from anxieties that take them off track in life. Young people need significant adults in their lives as well as their parents and their friends, to help them test out who they are and work out in what direction they should be headed – not just to please themselves, but to ensure that they make a really valuable contribution to the lives of others. These significant adults – whether they are sports coaches, teachers, close family friends, teachers or indeed foster parents – can help provide the glue in the lives of young people, giving them the courage and means to reach out and fulfil their own, immense potential.

Lynne Sawyers embodied that essence of significant adult, and the girls who heard her speak understood this. At the end of the questions after her speech, one girl went up to the podium and said: “I don’t have a question; I just want to give you a hug.” She did, the hall of the Women’s College erupted, and we all shared in the recognition of the power of humility and service.

We can learn so much from the great women of this world.

 

 

Jan 15

Dalton style

I have just been re-reading Helen Parkhurst’s excellent book ‘Education on the Dalton Plan’, and I thoroughly recommend it to discerning educators and those interested in how children learn in schools. Written and published in 1922, it contains an exposition, analysis and case studies of the progressive educational approach – the Dalton Plan – which Helen Parkhurst developed in the early decades of the 20th century. Her theory – which she demonstrated successfully in practice – was that children need space and time in which to learn; learning cannot be pre-determined in convenient chunks, and to try to mould a child’s learning to a fixed timetable is to do him or her a great disservice.

Helen Parkhurst came up with a practical plan to enable children to learn in ways that suited them rather than suited the dictates of a timetable: she ensured that the students in the schools in which she worked had access to clear, detailed assignments – a month’s work in each subject – in which were laid out the problems they had to solve. Teachers then were available to the children, and were able to work with the children to draw out their understanding in a much more individual and personal way. Helen Parkhurst called these ‘Laboratories’ – the classroom was transformed into a place of experimentation, and the student was able to discover the answers. A strong framework of progress checking and corrections was the final piece of her approach, and this ensured that all students made excellent progress – but with regard for their own individual learning styles and capabilities.

Ascham School, of course, has used a modified form of the Dalton Plan ever since one of its great Headmistresses, Miss Bailey, brought the plan to Australia in the 1920s, and it is hugely successful. Reading Helen Parkhurst today, one cannot fail but to be impressed by her no-nonsense, eminently sensible and far-sighted approach to educating in schools. In fact, one has the distinct impression that had our politicians and educational policy-makers spent more time over the past century reading her book, and less trying to fit more and more assessment into an already crowded curriculum, state-sponsored education in general might have had far more successful outcomes. “The true business of school”, she writes, “is not to chain the pupil to preconceived ideas, but to set him free to discover his own ideas and to help him to bring all his powers to bear upon the problem of learning.” (p.105). When writing about the problems of her age, she could almost be writing about the very same issues we have as educators in schools today when we are faced with the demands of exam boards and external assessment: “Today we think too much of curricula and too little about boys and girls … Subject difficulties concern students, not teachers. The curriculum is but our technique, a means to an end.” (p.23).

Christmas has now passed, but when our policy makers come round to thinking about what they want for Christmas in 2013, they could do far worse than to request a reprint of Helen Parkhurst’s tome. In the meantime, the Dalton Plan is alive and well in many great schools around the world. Ascham girls are, thankfully, not the only ones to have – so I have heard – ‘Dalton style’.

 

Jan 09

Navigating the social media minefield

Schools tend to be cautious about social media, and with real reason. In school, we see it in daily use amongst young people: schools, remember, see many hundreds – thousands, even – of young people in close proximity to one another, and as educators in schools, we gain an insight into their lives that is quite unique. It is a different perspective from that of parents, who know and love the special characteristics of their children, and who see them day in and day out in an environment which is very individual to their family; great schools should indeed also value, support and extend these individual characteristics, but they add too the essential dimension of the collective – young people together, learning to live together and work together, in preparation for their life in society and the contribution that they will learn to make to the world. While they progress along this path, these young people experiment, investigate and try out what the world has to offer, and social media is undeniably a part of this. In schools, we see this happening on a large scale, and can as a result draw various conclusions. Here are a few …

Social media as a concept is extremely positive. The history of the world is full of human conflict that can be put down to lack of communication and fundamental misunderstandings, and for most of this history, no way has existed to overcome the barriers of our natural world – time, distance, geography. Now, with the internet – and in particular a means of using the internet which enables immediacy of communication – we have the potential as the human race to overcome these misunderstandings and to grow in awareness of how other people live and work, to the ultimate benefit of us all. When fires ravage the Tasman peninsula, not only can people on the ground communicate and free themselves from danger, but people over the world can be alert to their predicament and offer support, both practical and emotional. When an Indian woman is gangraped and subsequently dies from her horrific injuries, the whole world can communicate, strongly and unequivocally, its horror, and can help to change both the law and the culture of her home culture. Social media played a tremendous role in the Arab Spring; it plays a smaller but nonetheless significant role on a daily basis for individuals who use it to connect with friends, grow relationships, and keep up to date, sensibly, with what is going on in the world.

Social media in reality has many dangers and pitfalls. It can be a huge timewaster. It can dominate lives and become an obsession if not held in check and in its proper place – the virtual world can never, remember, replace the real world. It can skew an understanding of the world rather than enriching it; computers, after all, are only as good as the data-input allows. Make poor choices of who to follow on Twitter, and you will have a very odd view of the world. Moreover, the very immediacy which brings so many benefits can also drown the user in banality; when people are indiscriminating in what they communicate online, and when other people are indiscriminating about what they read and soak up, the result can be a sea of inanity. At worst, it can be used to abuse, bully and torment. In all of these cases, however, it is the human perpetrator who is at fault. The immediacy of social media may accentuate the issue; it is the human behaviour that underpins the action of writing and sending that needs to be addressed

With this in mind, parents and schools need to lead – very firmly – by example. This is true in everything, of course, but is particularly important in situations where lack of adult guidance can lead to personal danger. We would not dream of allowing our young children loose on public highways without us holding their hand and educating them about road safety, and we recognise that this is a process that may take several years. Social media can be seen as the internet equivalent of the public highway; if you did not know the rules of the public road, you would learn them before you sought to educate your children, and you would practise before you allowed your children to proceed. This said, you would also recognise that children needed to be able to move around in their lives, and need to learn to navigate roads. So too it is with social media. If as educators and parents we can discover and learn about social media from the inside, if we can test its boundaries and work out what works and what doesn’t, then we are far better placed to be able to help guide our young people.

Life without the internet and the connectivity it brings is almost inconceivable today, and we can afford to embrace this as a positive if we are alert to the negatives and seek actively to prepare our young people to avoid the dangers and pitfalls. Social media has a tremendous amount to offer our world if we can bring our human wisdom to bear upon it and construct strong and safe boundaries around it. Onwards with the task of education …

 

Jan 02

Why write a blog?

A new year always brings new energy and new forward vision, and this is especially the case when the new year coincides with change – a new post, perhaps, a new city, or a new country … or even a new hemisphere. It is also a time to reflect on current practice and make sure that it continues to have relevance and force in the new order. Reflection is particularly important in a world which does not always seem to value the pause for thought; for those of us engaged in education, be we pupils, parents or educators, we have a distinct duty to remind people of this.

This blog, therefore, reflects on why writing a blog is, on balance, a good thing. I have been writing a blog for 18 months, testing out the medium, using it to comment on what is happening in the world, and I have reached the following conclusions:

People should write more. Writing is an under-valued art, and yet it is one of the most powerful ways we have as a human race to share not just information, but ideas, thoughts, perceptions and feelings. Writing can persuade, inform, challenge and reveal new perspectives. Writing enables the writer to think before communicating, and allows the reader to reflect while receiving and interpreting the message. Writing counters the instant, soundbite culture of our time, where words flow from mouths, to be lost in the ether. Writing – and reading what others have written – is important to help us all stop living predominantly in the superficial, and to reflect deeply and more profoundly on issues that are really of importance to us.

Writing a blog is a discipline. Writing itself is a discipline – not just the crafting of phrases and sentences into a form which has meaning to the reader, but the regular choosing of a topic, crystallising an opinion, and communicating this via the written word. Writing needs preparation, commitment and dedication. Good writing cannot just be dashed off and left; even the most inspired authors need to take time to consider, draft and re-draft. Speak to any successful author and she or he will tell you about their disciplined writing routine – a discipline that enables them to grow and develop their skill. A blog takes only a fraction of this time, of course, but the discipline is the same. Young people especially need to learn from adults the value of discipline, because the messages they receive from society around them do not always support this understanding.

We need to write more about things that really matter. Cyberspace is awash with trivia – and a cursory glance at the magazines and publications on the shelves of bookstores will reveal much more of the same. There is nothing wrong with trivia per se, if it exists as a small percentage of the material to which we are exposed, but when it is the dominating partner, it is suffocating of thought and the enemy of reflection. Mathematics teaches us that the way to adjust proportions is to add or subtract from each of the areas; an understanding of human psychology teaches us that it is more practical to change our behaviour than the behaviour of others. It follows, therefore, that if we are to tackle what sometimes appears to be a tsunami of inanity, then we need to take to the medium ourselves and write about what really matters – values, education and our global responsibilities to the human race. For the Head of a girls’ school, it makes perfect sense to write about issues of gender equality, about the challenges still facing girls and women around the world, and about how parents and schools can work in partnership to help our daughters grow into the adults they are meant to be.

Schools teach young people to write, and they encourage them to communicate via the written word. If our children do not learn how to write, their choices in life are limited. If they do not learn how to write well, their choices will be more limited than if they do. And in order to be motivated to learn to write well, they need to see the relevance and importance of writing around them, and they need to engage with writing not merely as passive readers, but as active, enthusiastic, purposeful participants.

I encourage you all to write, as an example to the next generation …

 

Dec 26

Endeavour and the spirit of discovery

A pleasantly symbolic moment on our flight to the southern hemisphere occurred when the captain of Qantas Flight 002 announced himself as Captain Cook. He was probably no relation at all of the great explorer, Captain James Cook, FRS, RN (1728-1779), but the shared name and the nature of his task made an immediate historical connection. Captain (James) Cook’s ship on his first voyage to the Pacific was HMS Endeavour, a replica of which now stands alongside the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney harbour – an impressive sight.

The story of Captain Cook is a fascinating one. You do not have to travel far in the Antipodes before finding landmarks named by the great sailor – Mount Cook in New Zealand, for instance, or the Cook Islands or Cooktown in Australia. Magnetic Island off the Queensland coast was so called because as Captain Cook passed by, his ship’s compass reputedly wobbled and failed to settle. The list is endless, as any glance at a guide book will tell you.

In all, Captain Cook made three voyages from Britain to the Pacific Ocean, and none was a voyage to be embarked on lightly. He was charting the waters, not sailing by existing maps – unlike his namesake on QF002, there was no radar, no satellite tracking, and no jet engines. Those were the days when there was still much that was entirely unknown in the world, so much still to discover, and he was a pioneer.

We forget, in this age of worldwide travel, just how arduous life for the early explorers must have been. And yet, although the age of the ship-borne adventurer may largely be past, their spirit of adventure lives on. There remain unexplored parts of our planet, from the jungle to the deep oceans, and we have barely touched on the exploration of space. People are engaged every day in pushing forward the bounds of human knowledge, and there is an undeniable drive within us all to want to find out more, to understand more and to learn about ourselves and the universe in which we live. We would be wise not to forget the trials of explorers such as Captain Cook – in them we see mirrored our hope for the discovery of the future.

 

Dec 11

Leaving with no regrets: the positive discipline of looking forward

I am now on the verge of departing St Mary’s Calne, and the past few days have been full of very moving occasions in which I have been able to say farewell, and in which members of the community have been able to say farewell to me (although I do point out that Australia is not actually that far away, and even less far electronically!). Farewells are important, though, and as part of this process I was interviewed last week by one of my Year 12 students – a budding journalist who also edits the school student magazine. One of the questions she asked me was whether I had any regrets about my time as Head of my current school. I considered her question and then answered truthfully that I didn’t: the point about regrets is that it is far too easy to waste time indulging in them. The time that we have on this planet is too precious to fritter away in thinking about what we could or should have done differently, and wishing that we could change something that cannot or should not be changed.

The results of a recent British Heart Foundation survey showed that the average UK citizen spends two hours 15 minutes a week regretting what he or she has or hasn’t done in life. The top ten of these regrets include not travelling enough and seeing more of the world, not keeping in touch with more friends from the past, and not exercising enough. The British Heart Foundation had run the survey to help promote their Overseas Fundraising Challenge, so the implicit encouragement to stop regretting and get on with putting these missing elements right – by travelling, exercising and being with friends – was a pleasantly convenient outcome for them. The significance of their research, however, is more wide-ranging: over two hours of waking time a week is a hefty period of time just to be regretting past action or inaction, especially as it is a fair guess that the associated feelings (probably similar to despondency) will last for longer than just two hours. Think what else you could do with those two or more hours a week; think what you could achieve if you set your mind to not having any regrets, but instead just moving forwards.

Having no regrets is a discipline; it is not easy, nor should it be an excuse for passing off bad behaviour – knowing that you must not regret something should not permit you to do something that you know in advance will be the wrong thing to do. When I speak to senior pupils on how to prepare to maximise their future choices, I say to them that they need to approach the future with positivity and “relentless optimism”. They can create their future; they will create their future to their liking and for the good of others if they are determined to move forwards, onwards, upwards, and leave their regrets behind.

It is only a few hours now until I leave St Mary’s Calne and travel to Australia to take up the Headship of Ascham School in Sydney. And although it is hard to leave a super school with super girls, I go in the spirit of adventure and of looking forward to an great new community. No regrets. Just wonderfully relentless optimism.

 

Dec 08

How do we protect our children from this rising tide of self-harm?

The BBC reported earlier this week that calls to ChildLine about self-harm had risen by 68% compared to last year, and this is a statistic that should alarm us. Most of the calls were from girls, and the age of many of the callers on this subject had dropped: self-harm has now become a leading issue amongst 14-year olds. All of this points to what Sue Minto, Head of ChildLine concluded: “It seems the pressures facing children and young people – particularly girls – are increasing at such a rate that some of them see these drastic measures as the only answer to their problems.”

Self-harm is an entirely alien concept to many parents, who find it almost inconceivable to think that their children might be taking a sharp object to a part of their body and physically harming themselves. It is, however, a very real – and a very worrying – phenomenon. Contrary to many of the myths that circulate about self-harm, this process is not usually about seeking attention. It is usually done in secret, and while it is a cry for help – a kind of primal scream that says that a child is not coping with the pressures she or he is facing – it is a silent cry, as the child cannot work out how to communicate the overwhelming nature of the feelings, thoughts and emotions that are pressing down and suffocating their power of reason and their ability to cope with life.

Life now is harder than ever before for our young people. Modern technology has brought a barrage of information, opinions and pressures, and the almost impossibly quantifiable nature of these means that young people can struggle to see a framework and structure within which to order their understanding of the world. Society often appears to be operating in a moral vacuum; even if young people hear strong moral voices from home and from school, these can be so at odds with what they see around them that they can become powerfully confused. Young people are bombarded, relentlessly, with contradictory messages that often attack the core of their being. It is little wonder that they can find it hard to cope.

If children – or adults, for that matter – self-harm, they need proper, supervised, psychological support. They have suppressed a protective inner barrier, and broken a human taboo, straying towards self-destruction rather than the drive towards self-preservation which keeps us all intact. They need help to resurrect this barrier and re-form around them the buffers and cushions that protect us all from the pain of raw exposure. With help, they will be able to do this and will become stronger and more resilient as a result.

But before it gets this far, families and schools – and all of us – can and should do something else: we need to build the resilience of our young people. We need to tell them, loud and clear, and again and again, that they have the capacity to make their own way in the world, that if they believe they can, they will, that they do not have to do it all, and they certainly do not have to do it now. They need to hear us say that they have the power within them to rise above the noise of society and identify what really matters – to shed the dross and concentrate on the strong values that unite us all. They need to hear that we are with them, and that we are there for them, even as they carve out their own unique path. We need to allow them to develop their own resilience and their own wisdom.

When we do all of this, our young people will be well-prepared for life in this imperfect society of ours.

 

 

Dec 05

Fidelis et Fortis

‘FIdleis et Fortis’ is the motto of James Gillespie’s High School, in Edinburgh, where I was a pupil for the last 4 and a half years of my secondary schooling. These were formative years but in common with many young people at the time, I know that I did not appreciate enough the influence that the school had on me and on my future life and career. This has been preying on my mind recently, however – no doubt something to do with the sense of tying up loose ends before setting off to move halfway round the planet – and on an impulse I phoned the school a few weeks ago and asked if I could come to visit while I was in Edinburgh last week. I went further, in fact; I explained what I do now in my life and what some of my journey had been, and I offered to help out in some way when I came to visit, if this was deemed desirable.

And so it was that I found myself speaking to a large group of senior pupils on how to maximise their chances of getting into the university of their choice, and to a large group of staff, including staff from nearby schools, on ‘Inspiring Leadership in the 21st Century’. I also spent two hours with the Head, discussing school leadership in general and sharing good practice. It felt as though I was giving back; it was my privilege to have done so. Moreover, it was a pleasure – the students were kind, respectful and at ease with adults, and I hope that my current students at Calne will have the opportunity to encounter them at some point in the future. The staff were great too!

The school was a little different from how I remembered it (not surprising, bearing in mind that I left in 1988) – there was no school uniform, for instance, and it is now a designated Gaelic school for Edinburgh (although English remains the language of instruction). It is about to undergo significant change, however, as it is to be rebuilt over the next 2 years – a massive project costing tens of millions of pounds. The feel and essence, however, seemed to me to be the same; at any rate, it felt familiar.

Interestingly, the Head – an experienced Head who moved to Gillespie’s at the beginning of 2012 – commented that his perception was that the community was one which was not afraid to think critically and to challenge appropriately, in the spirit of ensuring social justice. ‘Moral purpose’ was a phrase that resonated. It often takes people who still retain an outsider’s perspective to speak the truth about organisations, and this was a pleasing truth to hear.

The experience reminded me again – as if I needed reminding! – how important our schools are in forming our young people. It also reminded me to be grateful. School days – contrary to popular expectation – may not always be the happiest days of our lives, nor are they (or should they be) the easiest, but schools matter because they complement and accentuate the work of parents and help guide us through these days and these years; they challenge us, influence us, and help us to grow. They are staffed by people who have committed themselves to leadership – to leading the next generation and to leading the change we need to see in the world. We should all be grateful to these people.

So … thank you, James Gillespie’s High School, for helping me to grow into the person I have become. I will seek to repay the debt I owe you.

 

Dec 02

Dr Livingstone, I presume …

On Friday I returned from Edinburgh, where I met with some recent leavers from my current school, all now studying at Edinburgh University. It was a super occasion, and it was wonderful to see them enjoying student life – which includes studying very hard, of course! I had half an hour to spare between meetings, and I thought that I would use the opportunity to pop into the National Museum on Chambers Street; when I arrived, I discovered that one of their main current exhibitions was a reflection on the life of the great explorer and missionary, Dr David Livingstone, and I headed straight there.

David Livingstone was born in 1813, which makes 2013 the bicentenary of his birth. I knew this already, of course, because (as I mentioned in a blog just over a year ago), one of our older old girls from St Mary’s Calne, Belinda Hodge, has been busy for the past year galvanising support for children in Livingstone, Zambia, where some of our current pupils are going to help build a school next year – all part of the enduring legacy that Dr Livingstone left behind him. This anniversary was the reason for the exhibition, and it was fascinating – as indeed was the man himself.

Dr Livingstone was not only an explorer and a missionary; he was a great innovator and a medical doctor. Moreover, he was an acute observer of human beings, and appears to have had characteristics which endeared him to those he met, and led them to laud him: throughout Africa, towns and streets are named after him. His organisation and leadership may have been chaotic at times – his missions were not at all successful, and he did in fact appear to be lost when Henry Morton Stanley, sent out by the New York Herald to look for him, met him on the shores of Lake Tanganyika on 10th November 1871, and uttered those now immortal words – but he genuinely cared for those he met. He uncovered some of the horrors of the slave trade, and he described human trafficking as “this open sore upon the world”. He contributed to making a difference in this respect. He died in 1873 – the exact same year that St Mary’s Calne was founded, and only a few years before my new school, Ascham, was founded in Australia.

And then I saw one of his quotes, emblazoned on a banner, prominent in the exhibition. It struck an immense chord – and reinforced for me how important it is that we enrich ourselves by dipping into exhibitions about the lives of great people of a different age. The quote said this:

“I am prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward.”

As I make my final preparations to leave the shores of the UK to head to Australia, and as my students prepare to go to interviews for university places, and as the leavers at Ascham await their HSC results and look ahead to their futures, it is incumbent upon us all to remember that the advances in understanding that we have made a human race over the past centuries have all happened because people like Dr David Livingstone were prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward.

We must all go forward; it is our duty to do so. And as we do, not only do we make the most of our lives, but we create a better life for those who follow us, now and in the future.

 

Nov 28

Kitty Wilkinson, the Saint of the Slums: remembering our pioneering women

I very much enjoyed my visit last week to Liverpool, to attend our annual Girls’ Schools Association Heads’ conference, and I took the opportunity to discover a little more of the history of a city that was once one of the UK’s most important ports. (Actually, it still is – it is one of the few deep water ports in the UK, and so therefore a major hub for container traffic, especially to the United States and Canada.) As ever, however, I was drawn to the history of significant women in the area, and it was with this in mind that I came across the history of Kitty Wilkinson.

Kitty Wilkinson was born in 1786 in Londonderry and came to Liverpool as an immigrant in 1795. Her life was – as we might expect – a hard one, with time spent in a Lancashire mill from the age of 11 to 18, after which time she returned to Liverpool and worked in service until she married, had two children, was widowed and remarried. In 1832, during a cholera epidemic, she had the only boiler in the neighbourhood, and so she turned her house into a washhouse, allowing her neighbours to boil wash and thereby disinfect their bedding, which was the only way to kill the disease. Her actions brought her to the attention of the District Superintendent, and she was praised for her foresight and practical response to the epidemic. She saved many, many lives, and in the process educated many families about public health. After the epidemic, in 1842, she helped set up the first public washhouse in the country, the Public Baths and Wash House in Frederick Street, which she ran. She died on 11th November 1860, and is buried in St James’ cemetery in Liverpool. A statue of her was unveiled this September in St George’s Hall – the first woman to be honoured in this way.

The story of Kitty reminds us of two important elements in our history which we forget at our peril. First, it is a reminder that we have come a long way in public health and living conditions in a short period of time. Kitty’s story dates from less than 200 years ago, and in practice this is only a few generations back from where we are now. It was Kitty’s great, great, great niece who unveiled her statue two months ago; the family history of Kitty lives on, and we should not forget that it was only a short time ago that life was much more perilous than it is now – nor forget to wonder at the progress we have made as a human race in this time.

Second, it reminds us that women were at the heart of the community in our history – just as they are now. Women in 1832 may not have had the vote, nor been able to own property, nor had many of the rights they have now, but they were instrumental in leading and making things happen. Women led from the front, and our only shame is that it has taken us so long to recognise this. Kitty Wilkinson was a pioneer in the realm of public health; women throughout the ages have been pioneers. We owe Kitty and women like her a debt of gratitude.