Читать книгу The Making of Her - Clarissa Farr - Страница 8

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.

Of course, there are always some children who find it more difficult to integrate, even though often they may very much want to belong. In a high-achieving intellectual environment (where you test for many things but not emotional intelligence) there are more pupils than you might think who, despite their prodigious gifts, find the social contact with others difficult. And there are always a few who stubbornly resist, at odds with their school, rejecting its values and authority. They will not allow their individuality to be diluted, to be lured into some institutional conformity and suffer agency capture! They would be the grit in the oyster. But over time, a little pearl would often secrete itself around these too. For on the whole, especially when joining a new school at age eleven, children don’t want to be different or to stand out; they want to be accepted, and the first few weeks are all about fitting in and becoming part of the tribe. Pupils learn to belong by watching, adapting and through myriad small adjustments that often go under adult radar. Their ‘pack’ is their form, or tutor group, and this is the unit in which they first find their feet.

The importance of helping new pupils feel secure and grounded in their year group was a priority for me as a head because of something that happened to me, no doubt from the best of intentions, when at school in my first senior school year.

I had joined my senior school, Sunny Hill (known more formally as Bruton School for Girls), set on a rolling green hilltop outside Bruton, Somerset, in 1968. Aged ten, I was placed in Miss Reed’s first-form class. The youngest children in the school, we were taught in a long wooden hut with a gabled roof and its own small garden, rickety windows and walls pockmarked by drawing pins where our pictures, stories and poems were proudly displayed. Miss Reed, a tiny person with the bright brown eyes of a mouse, had the appearance of someone who spent her weekends taking bracing walks along cliff paths. That first term I quickly made friends and felt both absorbed and stimulated by everything we did; it was one of the happiest of my school days. But then everything changed.

One morning at the start of the second term, Miss Reed called me up to her desk. ‘I’ve something to tell you, Clarissa,’ she said, eyes twinkling. ‘You’re being moved up a year. The work will be more stretching. And it’s also that you’re more mature than the others …’ Mature! What was that? My world had just fallen apart. When was I to start? Well, there was no time like the present: it would be at once. Miserably, I said goodbye to my friends and was escorted down unfamiliar corridors to the alien, too-bright world of my new form room, where at the desk next to mine a sturdy girl with a pale-brown fringe and sensible glasses called Margaret Morgan had been told to look after me. Margaret was politely kind, but after a few days she admitted one break-time how she was missing spending time with her best friend, Cecily Krasker, and gratefully went off to find her. Sitting alone on a wall, I hoped I didn’t look too conspicuous and longed for the bell to ring so that I could return to the anonymity of the class.

Untethered from the lovely security of Miss Reed’s class and my friends, I was lost. I dreaded the long lunch hours where I would drift around, trying to attach myself to one group of girls or another. They were kind enough, but nobody really wanted me: friendships had formed a year ago and this new, younger girl was an awkward thing. I felt childish next to these impossibly mature thirteen-year-olds who had started to wear bras and have periods. Once only interested in the fascinating world of discovery that was the first-form classroom, now I was ashamed of my failure to reach these very different milestones. At last, after much hinting, my mother did allow me to have a bra and there was a mortifying trip to the local outfitters, where she and the well-padded assistant exchanged amused glances as an infinitesimally small garment was selected. We bought two, neatly packed in cardboard boxes, like clothing for a doll. One on, one in the wash, the assistant said efficiently. The anxiously awaited arrival of my periods – a rite of passage in the lives of all young girls – came to me long after it had ceased to be a newsworthy matter to our class generally, accompanied by a silent relief that, alone in the bathroom at home, I shared with no one.

Children adapt and are often more resilient than we expect. I eventually settled in to the new class and by the following year, had made friends and was starting to enjoy academic work again. From that unnecessarily rocky start I went on to have six more happy years at the school. In my penultimate year, unlooked-for success was secured as a result of a chance meeting between my grandmother and the headmistress in a local tea shop. Miss Cumberlege (I will come back to her later), seeking no doubt to make polite conversation, said to my grandmother: ‘Clarissa seems to be doing very well at school …’ to which my grandmother replied magnificently: ‘Doing well? Clarissa could run an Empire!’ No doubt on the strength of this I was soon appointed one of the four head girls. So all ended well, but that early experience of being moved up always seemed a pointless emotional setback, never more so than when I emerged at the other end of the school having taken my A levels at barely seventeen, too young to go to university. I spent an unremarkable gap year working in our local pub and interrailing around Europe. Perhaps I was just doing a bit more growing up: it felt as if I’d been forced through things too quickly.

Whoever we are, our experience of school informs our values and our adult view of the world. Having been very young in the year, I’m now particularly alive to that predicament in school children and how it affects them in ways that may go undetected by the adult radar. Children live their school lives amongst their peers and experience much that the adults around them, however well intentioned, will never know (one reason why bullying and unkindness can be so hard to detect). Age matters hugely in early adolescence: however intellectually advanced a pupil is, if her (or his) emotional and physical development are not aligned with that of peers, especially around puberty, then being fast-tracked through the system may well do more harm than good. Parents can be impatient for their children to achieve academic milestones, but to what end? Of course they need to be stimulated but this can happen in so many lateral ways; they also need time to grow and be themselves, to develop at their own pace amongst friends and peers with whom they feel at home. This is what creates confidence and provides the secure foundation for their self-esteem throughout life.

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.

You are all here because you have shown through competition that you have outstanding talent and outstanding potential. That should not make you smug or complacent because it gives you a responsibility – to make as much of those gifts as you possibly can. You will enjoy some great teaching here, but what you make of your potential will be to a large extent up to you. What we do together, in this school, is to aim as high as we can; to use our capability in the best way – not just when things go well, but when we stumble and things get harder too.

I would return to this idea of managing our own expectations of ourselves repeatedly when talking to both the students and staff, through the year. In some ways it became one of the most important messages of all in the constant task of balancing a stretching, challenging and exciting education with the fact that we all have edges to our capability and striving for excellence has to be tempered with an awareness of our individual limits. A happy balance is found when demands are great enough for energy and confidence to flow but not so great that they tip us over into stress and anxiety. In a school like St Paul’s, where the pupils are prodigiously talented, that balance, I found, had to be struck and restruck. Aspirations should be set high while being tempered with the active building of self-esteem and confidence, especially in girls who, in my experience, are inclined (partly because of the high standards they set themselves) to doubt themselves more than they should. Equally, that confidence mustn’t spill over into complacency or arrogance. One girl said to me privately, ‘I hate it when people say how clever we are …’ She felt it as a pressure, an unhelpful label. Only through the constant conversation could that balance be achieved and kept in fruitful equilibrium.

School assemblies, whether at the start of the year or not, rather than being merely ‘a hymn, a prayer and a bollocking’ – as one distinguished headmistress colourfully described them – can inform and set the tone, convey values and ethos as well as sometimes amuse and entertain. That is why I fought to keep the whole-school assembly (three times a week by the time I left the school) and would defend its value fiercely. Assemblies have been the vehicle through which I’ve conveyed some of the most important, and sometimes most difficult, messages during my two headships, including on three occasions, tragically, telling the school about the death of a pupil or member of staff. One of these was the death of my predecessor, Elizabeth Diggory, who survived the return of cancer for only eight months of her retirement.

Elizabeth, an elegant and gracious woman, shyer than her height and bearing made people think and perhaps someone who did not altogether relish standing up and addressing 700 or so difficult-to-impress teenagers, once told me that assemblies, these ten-minute gatherings of the whole school at 8.40 in the morning, were times when the Paulinas ‘expected to be entertained intellectually’. Privately resolving that this sense of entitlement would be something to coax them out of, I used the early assemblies of my headship not so much for any grand pronouncements or displays of intellectual skill but to introduce myself as a person. It was important as part of getting to know each other to show that the ‘high mistress’ was not just a formal figurehead in academic dress, only slightly more animated than the portraits of her predecessors lining the walls, but an individual with interests, tastes and opinions and importantly, flaws – someone you might get to know. At the start of my first term, for example, it had been twelve months since the news of my appointment had become public. Plenty of time for myths of various kinds to precede me, not all of which I scotched straight away. I came from a school in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire: where was that exactly – in the Midlands somewhere? Was it true that I planned to introduce uniform into this highly individualistic school, where the pupils all choose their own clothes? Did I really run marathons? While allowing certain myths to continue – the uniform one added a certain frisson – I talked to the girls and staff about my interests, my experiences – and occasionally my mistakes. Over the first few years, this involved forays into Thomas Hardy’s novels (my best attempt at a Dorset accent); a challenge to one of my predecessor’s adages that a Paulina should be taught to ‘think and not cook’ (they can of course do both), which involved baking a loaf of bread on the stage in my trusty Panasonic bread machine (the fire alarm having been briefly disabled); and an account of my re-education by the City of London Police following a speeding fine. Whether these stories ‘entertained intellectually’ was for others to say: what I hope they did was to give some sense of the high mistress as a human being, with preferences, foibles and failings, just like anyone else.

The various rituals of the start of the year almost done, I always felt relieved to feel the term begin to get into its rhythm. But the patterning of the academic year and the frame that it gave to everything we did was always there. What other kind of life is marked by such a formal structure? In the UK, three ‘terms’ are divided by three holidays still – in most schools – aligned traditionally to the Christian calendar: we have the Christmas holidays, the Easter holidays and then the long summer break. In the midst of each term there are the half-term holidays, sometimes lasting for a week but in many cases for two in the autumn. A regular and predictable pattern, published by most schools a year in advance. Before the current move by some families towards taking holidays in term time, when flights and accommodation are generally far cheaper, this was an absolute red line that could not be crossed. As high mistress I would write a letter to parents at the start and end of most terms and one of my crisper efforts included the words: ‘Thank you for not asking me if you can leave two days early at the end of term because the flights are less crowded.’ But even then it did not entirely work. And my cause certainly wasn’t helped when I made my own mistake about holiday dates shortly after Adam, my son, started at a new school. Thinking to celebrate my mother’s birthday, I had booked a five-day trip to Venice for my mother, myself and the children at summer half term. Half term is always a week, isn’t it? Only at my son Adam’s school, I discovered a week before departure, that half term was actually only two days. Paralysed with embarrassment, I picked up the phone to launch a major charm offensive on the deputy head. ‘I thought it would have real educational value, Carl,’ I wheedled, hoping desperately this wasn’t going to go right round the staffroom the minute I put the phone down. ‘That’s all right, Clarissa – these things happen,’ came the reply after a short pause, during which I realised Carl had been stifling amusement sufficient for his broad grin not to be audible down the phone. We went to Venice: the sun shone, the water slapped against the jetty outside the hotel. I still have the picture of my mother sitting on the steps of Santa Maria della Salute and of Adam in his gondolier’s hat. But I didn’t make that mistake again, and I always remembered to be particularly respectful to Adam’s deputy head. Unsurprisingly, I have since been a little more tolerant of the occasional ‘diary moment’.

An aspect of the school year which causes more widespread problems for parents is the dogged idiosyncrasy of individual schools. A year or so ago I read a very sensible letter from a grandfather who was concerned about the strain on his daughter, struggling as she was to juggle the demands of the slightly different term and holiday dates of her four school-aged children. I’m no mathematician but you can quickly work out that this poor woman was racing round trying to avoid the Carl conversation over no fewer than forty-eight potential dates during the year. And that’s before she started trying to take account of the extra holidays, special half-days and INSET (in-service training) days that are squeezed in to confuse parents by these ‘constantly on holiday’ teachers. It shouldn’t be beyond independent schools in the same city – London, say – to agree to have the same holiday dates, should it? Try suggesting it. I somewhat naively did so at a regional heads’ meeting, where people looked at me with that indulgent incredulity reserved for those asking why Oxford and Cambridge colleges can’t adopt consistent admissions procedures. Feeling the weight of centuries of baroque and inexplicable process settle like a vast smothering tapestry over my head, I said no more.

We have the formal structure of years and terms. And then there is the shape of each day. As Larkin puts it with beautiful simplicity:

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?[1]

In a school, the regular set pattern of each day is often punctuated and symbolised by the ringing of bells for lessons and break time. Some might think this restrictive: imagine being an adult and still having your day determined by a bell every half an hour or so. In my experience, as a teacher, it’s a way of making sure you have the most exceptionally productive day. You might long for a precious free period to get your marking done, but it isn’t possible to find you’ve wasted over half an hour noodling around on your phone if you have twenty eager faces in front of you ready to discover the Russian language and you only have that particular thirty-five minutes in which to help them do so. A class cannot be kept waiting! And again, there is comfort in the familiar regularity. We conducted an experiment at St Paul’s to see whether to change the shape of the school day, but after a lengthy and highly consultative process, we decided more or less to keep things as they were. There was something in the rhythm and pattern that seemed balanced, as if we were biologically adapted: the changed day felt by turns piecemeal and baggy, lacking in proper flow – just wrong, somehow.

Living to the discipline of the academic year, week and day has its frustrations and constraints. At the same time, it provides a familiar rhythm from which we can draw confidence, security and comfort. I believe that the pattern and structure which we become used to at school meets a more fundamental and lifelong human need: to feel ourselves located, grounded, placed in relation to the world around us. To lack that – and sometimes in life if we are untethered from our moorings and face periods of confusion or loss – produces a feeling very like the homesickness we might recall from childhood. In a world of expanding possibilities and greater uncertainty we are fortunate that in schools, our children’s lives still have this regular pattern: its cycle of peaks and troughs of concentration, anticipated special days and traditional events, giving the school year a safe and familiar rhythm. And just as a school encourages ambition and challenges its pupils to take intellectual risks and aim high, it balances this with a longer perspective, with patience and compassion. If you mess things up, there will be a chance to start again: next half, next term, next year.