Nov 14

A terrifying experience at Tate Britain

It is not often that I am terrified by a work of art, but this would not be too strong a description of what happened to me last Friday. I was in London for a lunch time meeting connected with the Girls’ Schools Association, and because I was slightly early, I popped into Tate Britain to explore the exhibits and indulge my curiosity. I don’t always ‘get’ modern art, but I am always open to new experiences, and I thought that perusing works that were acknowledged as great would be a better use of a spare 30 minutes than simply checking my BlackBerry.

I wandered through the galleries, opened my mind, and stretched my understanding – always a good way to refresh the soul – until I came to a nondescript plywood door, with an attendant outside and a board indicating that this too was an exhibit: Mike Nelson’s ‘The Coral Reef’. I had to check that it was all right to enter; when given permission by the benevolent attendant, who must experience such uncertainty on the part of visitors every day, I stepped bravely but cautiously through the door … and embarked on a real journey.

If you have read about this installation, or visited it, then you will know exactly what I saw – small, tawdry rooms with doors which creaked and led to other chambers and corridors – or which led nowhere at all. The installation is entirely enclosed, and there is no map, so there is no sense of where you are headed. Dim lights, 1950’s sofas and shocking artefacts such a clown’s mask build an impression – a very real impression – of a disturbing world which, even if not post-apocalyptic, is a world of unforgiving menace. At one point I became totally, frighteningly, disorientated, arriving in a room which was an exact replica of the first room I had entered – but with no way out. When I found my way back to the entrance, I jumped to see again the benevolent attendant – who must experience this too from visitors every day – and my experience of relief at emerging from a labyrinth of ‘lost souls’, as it is described, was palpable.

The Coral Reef is an exceptional piece of art; it had a physical, emotional and psychological impact on me and the images remain seared in my mind. If you want to hear Mike Nelson talking about his work, look at this section of the Tate Britain website. This was a piece of modern art which I totally ‘got’.

Nov 12

Change in the air … Australia is beckoning

I say to my girls at school often that they should make the very most of their lives, as they only have one life, and every moment of it is precious. When opportunities come along, they should be grasped and girls should not be afraid to move outside the comfortable zones in which their lives have developed; in fact, it is only by doing so that they can truly experience the world and live life to the full. I say too, frequently, that this is a global world which they inhabit, and that they should be prepared to live, work, study and travel far and wide in order to be able to appreciate what this magnificent world of ours is, and to develop an understanding of humanity which will help them to make a positive change for the better in their own lives and in the lives of others.

And so … I am practising what I preach and have heard the call to move with my family to Australia in January 2013 – just over a year from now – to become the Head of Australia’s leading girls’ school, Ascham School in Sydney. It is a great school, with a long tradition of excellence in the education of young women, and I feel privileged to be able to continue this tradition and help prepare girls for the challenges of the future that awaits them. I am glad to be bringing an international dimension, and I am glad to be faced with new challenges of my own – a wonderful new culture, a different school system, a new national curriculum … to name but a few. It is a great honour to be selected for this post, and I shall enjoy immensely getting to know and lead the community.

I shall miss my current school, St Mary’s Calne, tremendously, and I am so proud of what I have achieved over the past decade. The school is riding high in every respect – it is a strong, focused, deeply happy and intensely warm school, and the outstanding teams of staff, overseen by a superb Board of Governors, will make the transition to another Headmistress an easy and seamless one. I shall miss the girls, the staff and the parents, but the time has come to leave behind what I see as the best school in the UK. I shall never forget what we have experienced together, and I have no intention of losing contact. An email sent from the UK to Australia takes a few seconds to arrive, and you can travel from any one point in this world to somewhere else and arrive within 24 hours. The world is smaller than it has ever been. Besides, though, we still have over a year together, and there is much to be done in this time!

This next phase of my life – and of my family’s life – is about building upon what I (and we) have learned to this point, not about leaving it behind. There is too much to do in respect of the education of young people, and of girls in particular, and I feel incredibly highly motivated to make this work across the globe. My recent trip to Bangladesh (see previous blogs) brought home to me with a power that almost took my breath away how important it is for all of us in the developed world – from Europe to the US to Australasia, drawing in all developed countries en route – to reach out beyond our boundaries to help make this world a fairer place, and this often starts with the education of girls and women. Every girl I help to educate – be it in the UK or in Australia – has the potential to help make the difference in the world that the world so needs, and it is an enormous privilege to help make this happen.

As I am fond of saying, and as the girls at St Mary’s Calne have adopted on my behalf as a school motto … onwards and upwards! Watch this space.

Nov 11

Remembering the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month …

Today – Remembrance Day – people across the globe will pause for reflection at 11am on 11.11.11 – a poignant combination of figures on a poignant day. Every year in our school assembly around this time I talk about remembrance, and I firmly believe that it is quite right to do so – we should never forget the people who gave their lives so that the lives of others might be better, nor should we forget that it is up to all of us to ensure that war, fighting, and terror disappear from our world.

And we will best remember this when we remember the consequences of war – of the millions killed and injured, and those whose lives have been devastated as a result. In helping us to do this, the work of one organisation is key: an organisation which seeks to keep these memories alive, lest we forget -the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Today, the Commission takes care of the graves and memorials of 1.7 million men and women from across the Commonwealth who died in the two World Wars. In all there was a total of 1,146,918 burials. Picture these graves laid end-to-end: the line would be about 2,300 kms long – a horrific number, but it does give us a better idea of the enormous task that the Commonwealth War Graves Commission carried out then, and continues today.

It all began when, at the beginning of the First World War, a man called Fabian Ware, too old to serve in the army, arrived in France in September 1914 to lead a mobile unit of the British Red Cross. He very soon noticed that there was no one in charge of marking and recording the graves of those killed. He understood how distressing this was both for relatives at home and for those still fighting, to think that lives had been sacrificed and then the bodies just left to rot in some anonymous field and he decided to make sure this was not allowed to happen. In order to comfort relatives, the newly founded Commission quickly completed some experimental cemeteries, using the best architects and garden designers to make the places ‘less miserable and unsightly.’ At Rouen, the writer Rudyard Kipling (who himself had a long association with the Commission) described ‘the extraordinary beauty of the cemetery and the great care that the attendants had taken of it, and the almost heartbroken thankfulness of the relatives of the dead who were buried there.’

Today, there are Commonwealth graves and memorials in 148 countries across the world. It is always hard to imagine numbers on this scale when we talk about the dead of the two world wars – and these are only the people who died. Still more difficult to imagine are the numbers of parents, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, aunts and uncles, the girlfriends, the boyfriends and the neighbours left behind to pick up the pieces of their own lives after suffering the loss of someone they loved.

War is devastating. As the number of survivors of the World Wars gradually fades, it is up to us all, each one of us, to remember this.

There will be no peace

till attitudes change;

till self-interest is seen as part of common interest;

till old wrongs, old scores, old mistakes are deleted from the account;

till the aim becomes co-operation and mutual benefit rather than revenge or seizing maximum personal or group gain;

till justice and equality before the law become the basis of government;

till basic freedoms exist;

till leaders – political, religious, educational – wholeheartedly embrace the concepts of justice, equality, freedom, tolerance, and reconciliation as a basis for renewal;

till parents teach their children new ways to think about people.

There will be no peace: till enemies become fellow human beings.

Nov 09

More reflections on Bangladesh: Child Domestic Workers in Dhaka

When I see my Year 7 girls at school, aged 11 and 12, go past me into Assembly each morning, I am struck forcefully by the contrast with their counterparts at the centre for child domestic workers in Dhaka which I visited with Plan UK during my visit to Bangladesh two weeks ago. This centre was in effect the entrance hall to an apartment block; it had been donated by the owner for the use of one of Plan’s 20 learning centres for 20 of the 400 child domestic workers that they manage to reach through the project, and in it, the children come for 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, to experience some non-formal educations, some recreation and some counselling, as well as job skill training and awareness raising of personal safety.

It seemed to me that the centre was in effect a lifeline to these child domestic workers, who otherwise had no contact with others, and who worked in the home up to 16-18 hours a day, 7 days a week. One girl (a 14 year old who had been working since she was 10) described her work looking after her employer’s baby and doing the cleaning; she sleeps on the floor of the drying room and gets up at 6am every morning, for which she was paid around 600 taka a month (£1 = approximately 120 taka, so she was paid the equivalent of £5 a month). She was fed and housed, but she – and the other girls in the centre, who were enjoying drawing pictures of their fantasies (trees and villages) – were tiny; no-one in this group was over-fed, for certain.

It is astonishing that in the world today society tolerates the deprivation to which these children – these girls, for they were all girls – are subjected. These children have no support structures – no healthcare, no education – and are placed in what is in effect servitude. Of course, as I had come to realise, the underlying reason was poverty, as their families could not afford to feed them … but this does not make it in any way better, and simply calls on us (who are so much better provided for) to do something about it. Besides, there is a gender imbalance to be redressed; although there is near gender parity of children in primary school in Bangladesh now, the number of girls in education drops rapidly further up the school in socio-economically deprived areas.

So Plan is doing something about it, creating these centres which are full of hope and purpose, preparing the girls for a life beyond servitude. What does the girl I met want to do? Her family is saving a tiny amount each month from her wages and she intends to open a shop in a few years’ time. Her goal is to become ‘self-dependent’. And I really, really hope that she does; she deserves that future.

Nov 06

The fabulousness of girls’ schools!

I have just returned from the Independent Schools’ Show in Battersea, London, where I was speaking in the morning on the subject of ‘The benefits of single-sex education’. In the afternoon, I was on a ‘MyDaughter’ panel of Heads of girls’ schools, chaired by Sarah Ebner of Schoolgate, so I had a double dose of single-sex education, and a thoroughly enjoyable day focusing on what it is about our single-sex girls’ schools that make them so great.

It is a question that I am often asked ‘ why single-sex girls? ‘ and I tend to respond from a very personal perspective. My journey in senior school teaching in the independent schools’ sector in the UK began with an all boys’ school, and I moved from there into a co-educational school because I wanted to be more involved with girls and their development. By the time of my second co-educational school, however, and especially because I was at the time studying part-time for an MA in Applied Linguistics which sensitised me to language and gender issues, I began to feel that girls deserved something more, and as a result I moved into my first girls’ school.

What a revelation! Here was a place where girls could do anything to which they set their minds, where pressures of gender stereotypes were absent, and where girls could just be themselves – relaxed, natural girls and young women. Here there was a space – a real gift of space – for girls to learn who they were, learn to like themselves, and learn that life holds an infinite possibility for them.

Now in my second girls’ school – and fast approaching the end of a glorious decade of my life here – I understand even better, and am yet more passionate about, the effect that girls’ schools have on the girls who join them. They are amazing places, full of energy, joy and a refreshing normality that is at odds with an outdated image that prevails in the tabloid press. ‘Relaxed and purposeful’ is a phrase I often use to describe my own school, and I see this reflected in many excellent girls’ schools. In a great girls’ school, a girl learns how to be.

And we must not underestimate too the importance of girls’ schools in helping us to address our social history and to change, gently but firmly, the imbalances of the past whose residues linger in so many parts of our society. Girls’ schools teach girls that they can be anything that they want to be – so long as they are responsible citizens; they empower them; they give them the opportunity to discuss issues which can vex our current generations of young women, such as working motherhood; and they teach them how to push boundaries and make choices that are right for them, for their families and for their wider communities.

And the proof of their success? Just look at the young women when they graduate from their girls’ schools: grounded, comfortable in themselves and making the most of their lives. What more as parents could we ask for our daughters? Girls’ schools are – quite simply – fabulous!

What a marvellous day I have had, reminding myself of this!

Nov 01

What child marriage really means, and why we should do something about it

Before I travelled to Bangladesh, I knew that child marriage had been identified as a key issue in the country. According to UNICEF’s 2011 State of the World’s Children report, about a third of women in Bangladesh aged 20-24 are married by the age of 15, and 66% of girls will wed before their 18th birthday. This is a shockingly high figure, placing Bangladesh in the top three countries for child marriage in the world.

What I had not really appreciated, however, were the stories behind the statistics. I had not really understood, until I met the families and the girls affected, just how embedded child marriage is in Bangladesh, not because this is somehow an ancient cultural tradition, to be respected and venerated, but because – quite simply – poverty means that there is often no other way for families to be able to feed their daughters. If you couldn’t afford the basic food necessary for survival, and you saw a way out for your daughter, so that someone else could feed and house her, you might feel impelled take that route too, even if you knew that by doing so you were likely to be subjecting her to hardship and even cruelty, and placing her in danger of death and complications in child-bearing.

Child marriage is, of course, wholly wrong. A girl who is married at, say, 14, effectively ends her childhood. She is removed from her friends and her education ceases. Stories of abuse – not just of domestic drudgery, but real abuse – are commonplace. If she has children, she is twice as likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than if she was able to wait until her twenties – and maternal death is 25 times more likely in Bangladesh than in the UK, so the danger is very real.

The impact is hard to deny when you meet the girls who have been affected by child marriage – not just the girls who have been married and who have escaped, but those who managed to avoid child marriage, but at a huge emotional cost to themselves. One particularly harrowing encounter I witnessed was with a girl who had discovered at the age of 15 that she was about to be married, but who had fought against her mother, her relatives, and the leaders of the village, all of whom had pressured her to marry. Five years later, the recollection of this time brought back raw and painful memories, both for her and for her mother, who had also clearly been scarred by the events. It is the powerlessness that poverty brings that leads parents to do this to their daughters, and it is poverty that we must fight, alongside the attitudes that lead people to think that child marriage is an acceptable solution.

Plan is doing something about this, and it is clearly part of the national conversation – in the three days I spent in Bangladesh, I found a number of references in the daily newspapers to the need to reduce and eliminate child marriage. So far, Plan has helped 87 villages declare themselves genuinely ‘child marriage free’, and to look towards education and vocational training as a way forward for their daughters instead, to help support themselves and their families.

Plan UK have released a comprehensive briefing on child marriage, presented to the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting which has been taking place in Perth, Australia, and you can read it here. It explores in detail the reasons for child marriage across the world, and sets out clearly and unequivocally what Commonwealth leaders can do to end it. Do read it – and do your bit to help lobby our government and others to put an end to child marriage – not just in Bangladesh, but throughout the world.

Oct 30

Images of Bangladesh

It is the images of the children – and especially the girls – which will stay with me forever.

Those of you who have been following me on Twitter, or who read my blog last Sunday, will know that I have spent the past week in Bangladesh with the children’s charity Plan, on a trip organised by Plan UK to visit some of the many projects run by Plan in the country. In the course of the three days I spent there, I was able to see vocational training for girls in the slum of Dhaka, visit a factory where girls work after graduating from their training, visit a shelter home for girls, see in practice a rural early-years programme on the veranda of a tiny village dwelling, followed by an adolescent peer session exploring gender issues and the role of girls, attend a session enrolling my family’s (now) sponsored child into the Plan sponsorship programme, visit a village school (which included a discussion on how the village had become child marriage-free with the help of Plan), visit a Community Health Clinic, visit the homes of two girls who had been affected by child marriage, see a session of informal education for child domestic workers, and visit a school for urban school children which was essentially constructed of sheets of corrugated steel but whose children were amongst the most cheerful I have ever encountered.

This visit gave me a deep and moving insight into the lives of the poorest children in Bangladesh, and I will reflect on some of the issues to emerge over the next few days and weeks, in subsequent blogs. But, as I said at the start of this blog, it is the images of the children which will stay with me forever.

The girl in the shelter home for girls, herself only in her early teens, who was organising the younger girls and who, despite having nothing, and having experienced the most profound poverty and deprivation, walking miles each day to fetch rotten vegetables for her family, is determined to become a teacher and help others.

The calm and collected girl, far older than her years, who had been married at the age of 14, tortured by her husband and husband’s family, and only through the intervention of her own family, shaming her father-in-law at his place of work, had been able to escape, 2 years later.

The glimpse, as we sped past, of a naked toddler by the roadside, playing in her family’s makeshift but permanent dwelling, as her brother collected water from a pool and a monkey wandered past the area where her mother was cooking. What future will that child have?

The young girl who had the school council role of ‘Minister of Education’ at Lokmipur Primary School – articulate, forceful and not prepared to accept anything other than a quality school – and who made her point effectively to the village leaders and parents.

The child domestic worker aged 14, who has been working in a family in Dhaka since she was 10 – working 7 days a week, from 6am to 9pm, with only two hours a day free to attend a centre for education, and yet who is pleased to be receiving around £5 a month to help support her own family back in her village, and to save for the future.

All of these children – and more – I will revisit in my next few blogs. They share one thing in common: although they are so poor that it would take your breath away to think about what we have in comparison to what they have, they are positive and determined to improve not only their lot in life, but the lot of others. Plan is doing an amazing job, working with communities to help change attitudes to girls and women in particular, reducing the impact of poverty by demonstrating alternatives to, for example, child marriage.

We owe it to all these children and their families to support this work. Please do – www.plan-uk.org

Oct 23

Bangladesh calls – embarking on a trip to support Plan UK’s work with children

On Monday I am headed to Gatwick to join the tremendous chief executive of Plan UK, Marie Staunton, on a three day trip to Bangladesh (travelling out on Monday, with full days in Bangladesh on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and travelling back on Friday), to see in practice some of the work that Plan UK is doing with children in Dhaka and, further out from the capital, in Gazipur. At the beginning of this year, both at school and in my capacity of President of the Girls’ Schools Association, I adopted Plan UK as our international charity, but I never imagined at the time that I would have the opportunity to be able to see their work in action, and it is a huge honour and a privilege to be preparing to go out to see what they are doing on the ground.

Plan UK runs a powerful campaign ‘ Because I am a Girl ‘ which you should look up if you haven’t already come across it. 75 million girls in the world – 75 million! – are not in education, and their campaign seeks to do something about this. When girls and young women are educated, it has a demonstrable effect on their families, communities and nations, and those of us who are lucky enough to benefit from outstanding education systems have a responsibility to ensure access to school for those who do not. We all know what difference an education makes.

Part of what keeps girls out of education is a culture in which girls are married young, forced into early marriage, and Plan’s particular drive this year has been to end child marriage. ‘Take the Vow’ yourself; girls should be walking to school, not up the aisle. Bangladesh, unfortunately, is one of the top three countries in the world where child marriage is prevalent. Two thirds of girls are married before the legal age of 18 – a shocking figure – but work can be done to prevent this, by creating ‘child marriage free’ villages, and I will have the opportunity to understand how this has been achieved by listening to community representatives and local government representatives in Lakshmipur.

I will also be visiting a vocational training centre in Dhaka, a shelter home for girls, two schools and, I very much hope, the home of a child who my family and I will be sponsoring, and from whom we hope to learn. (It costs so little to sponsor a child and yet makes a huge difference to the child’s community, as the money is used to help the whole village – do look at this link.) There will be many people to meet, and so much to see and experience. Connections – and time! – permitting, I shall try to keep in touch over the week on Twitter (@drhelenwright); I shall certainly write about it on my return.

Reading my briefing notes on the projects I am due to visit, I am full of admiration for the work done by Plan UK. It makes me proud to be a human being, knowing how much we are doing to help others – the ‘good news’ stories that so often elude us. There is so much to be done, however, to help eliminate poverty and disease, and to provide opportunity for our fellow human beings. We all have such a lot to learn and gain from one another.

Oct 20

ParentPort: a way forward to protect our children

It was fantastic last week to see clear action being taken by the Government – as promised – to implement some of the major recommendations of the Bailey Report, ‘Letting Children be Children’, which was published in June. The report described a landscape in which our children are bombarded by sexualised imagery, and content designed to tempt them into commercialism, and it set out a range of measures both to prepare children to understand and resist these temptations, and to help protect children from inappropriate material.

Chief amongst these proposals – which included a service for new internet subscribers where they must actively ‘opt in’ if they wish to access adult content, new guidelines on what can be displayed on billboards near schools, and a new app to allow parents to choose the times of day their children can use their phones, and whether or not they can use the internet – was a new website, ParentPort, which gathers together in a single site the links needed to complain to advertisers or parts of the media responsible for material which parents (or others) find offensive or inappropriate for children. It is not perfect – it is far from the ‘single-click’ solution which is the ideal in our world today – but it is an enormous advance, and a hugely encouraging step in the right direction. There is a sense of purpose about it; in using it, you will have the sense that your concerns are being noted, and that someone is listening to you.

It should be noted that this kind of result – a new service for parents – does not happen by accident; it happens because people – concerned parents and citizens – are prepared to stand up and be counted, make their case to their MPs, and garner support for the issues. Pressure groups such as Safermedia have worked tirelessly to draw attention to the subject, and Claire Perry MP has made it a major focus of her work. The work is far from done, however – now that the means to complain about inappropriate images, films etc are in place, we must actually use them to ensure that pressure is placed on advertisers and programme makers to step back from the seemingly endless drive towards more and more sexualised imagery, and greater and greater commercialisation. Only by using them will our voice be heard; only by speaking out will change happen.

So – remember ParentPort. And when you next feel uncomfortable about something you are watching on TV with your child, log on and make yourself heard.

Oct 17

Why we need to keep up the pressure for women on Boards

It was good to read last week that David Cameron had written to the chief executives of the FTSE 100 companies to remind them of their obligation – recommended in Lord Davies’ report on Women in Boards published last February – to work out how they are going to aim for 25% female representation on their Boards by 2015. 58 of the FTSE 100 companies have published goals and plans, which still leaves a hefty proportion for whom we are still waiting; according to The Times, 14 FTSE 100 companies still have all-male boards, which means that their task is harder, so we await with interest how they are going to do this.

Lurking in the background, of course, is the spectre of quotas – imposed, legal quotas on the number of women that Boards must have in order to be allowed to function. Realistically, no-one wants quotas – Boards need the freedom to be able to appoint the very best people regardless of gender, men need not to feel that they may not have been appointed simply because they are men, and women need to be utterly secure that they were appointed because they were genuinely the best person for the job, if they are to avoid the risk of being undermined in boardroom politics.

Yet something needs to be done. Boards with women on them do better, as research from McKinsey shows; gender diversity makes a difference. And while we can understand that our social history cannot be reversed in an instant, it is clear too that there is some powerful resistance underlying the lack of women on boards in some quarters, which explains the anger and frustration of key women leaders revealed at a meeting last month attended by Janice Turner of The Times, which she reported in her column.

Boards need to grow up and wise up – recognise that there are some amazing women leaders out there, and find them. Even better, they should undertake to grow and nurture them. If this means opening minds to the advantages of flexible working practices and flexible career patterns as a way of making it possible for women and men to create the balance they need, this is no bad thing at all; it is a positive advance and embracing of the modern world. We live in a world where technology makes connecting with people and working around other commitments so much more possible than it ever was when bowler-hatted, briefcase-carrying, umbrella-wielding executives – invariably men – caught the 8.16 train to Waterloo every day.

It is time to move forward – and it shouldn’t stop with the FTSE 100.