THE MAKING OF HER
Why School Matters
Clarissa Farr

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.williamcollinsbooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Clarissa Farr 2019

Cover photograph © Shutterstock

Clarissa Farr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Image here from Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein, Sara Ishikawa, A Pattern Language Towns, Buildings, Construction (Oxford University Press, 1977)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008271305

Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008271312

Version: 2019-08-07

Dedication

Remembering my parents, Alan and Wendy Farr

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

Chapter 1 September: Back to school – ‘the make-believe of a beginning’

Chapter 2 October: A question of gender – still vindicating the rights of women?

Chapter 3 November: Headship – opening up the path on which the next generation will travel

Chapter 4 December: Living in community – the love of tradition and the role of co-curricular life

Chapter 5 January: Competition and cooperation – what kind of education do we want for our children?

Chapter 6 February: Be a teacher – be the one you are

Chapter 7 March: Promoting well-being and mental health – a twenty-first-century challenge

Chapter 8 April: When things go wrong – running with risk, facing up to failure, living with loss

Chapter 9 May: Creating the triangle of trust – working with today’s parents

Chapter 10 June: Valediction and looking to the future

Afterword

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Foreword

Coming back from teaching to my office, I find an intricate, pop-up paper sculpture made from the insides of a book perching like a curious bird on my desk, with a note from the artist. Meanwhile, a shock netball match result against a team we were certain to beat reverberates around the building. A tutor reports that a head of peacock-blue hair has materialised in the Lower V (surely it was brown yesterday?) and we discuss whether this requires a response. On results day, a girl is face down on the marble concourse after it emerges she has a near-disastrous GCSE profile of nine A*s and one A. Four of our youngest girls come to see me to ask if I can be filmed saying the first word that comes into my head when they say ‘Paulina’ (‘independent’). And just after Christmas, my urgent attention is required by parents whose daughter has been offered a place at the wrong Oxbridge college. What, Ms Farr, are you going to do about it?

Such are the fragments that make up the life of a headmistress – but how to capture them? The headlong nature of schools means I could do little more than fire off the occasional letter to The Times from my iPhone while heading towards the Great Hall of St Paul’s to take assembly, scribbled notes flying. And even if I could set them down, would anyone be interested?

School. The word conjures a world at once so familiar as to be hardly worthy of comment (much less a book) but at the same time often attended with emotion: for some, affection and nostalgia, for a few, sadly, hostility and anger. There are those for whom school was a mixed or even traumatic experience, those for whom it was mainly rather dull and, equally, there are some for whom nothing has ever been quite as much fun since.

This book is for anyone who has been to school. I invite you to go back in time to that unique and personal world, to walk the academic year with me and to reconnect in memory with the teachers, places and habits that were yours. This isn’t meant as therapy, you understand: how would I presume to offer that? I have been lucky: happy for the most part at school in Somerset (I’ve expunged the memory of diving into the freezing outdoor pool in April) and apart from the equally icy coldness of the billowing, black-clad nuns at my convent primary school, my school days were far from traumatic. But whatever our recollection of school, to revisit that impressionable time is to understand better who we have become and why. And the more we can turn our education to good account in the present, the more we can help our children, whose adult lives will be so different from ours, to do the same.

School came to mean something different when I became a teacher – not through a high-minded desire to serve the next generation but because, while putting the finishing touches to my MA dissertation, I was, somewhat pretentiously, obsessed by the novels of Henry James. ‘Live! … Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to,’ he writes in The Ambassadors – and I wanted to do so. This meant finding an excuse to go on reading James while being paid and, if possible, persuading my students of the unrivalled brilliance of these works. In practice as a teacher I rarely touched on his labyrinthine novels – most of my pupils would have been escaping through the doors (or windows) before I reached the end of the first, attenuated, periodic, excruciatingly Jamesian sentence. Instead, I was surprised to find I liked the company of my students for its own sake: their quick-wittedness, their irreverence, their refusal to be impressed.

I began my working life in the ordered world of Farnborough Sixth-Form College. The students were barely younger than I was and teaching Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale as a twenty-two-year-old young woman to a class peppered with eighteen-year-old boys provided challenges I hadn’t been trained for (no, they might not kiss me – not even once – at the end of term). I was able to learn some of the craft of teaching with A-level students who had chosen their subjects and were eager to learn. This was not a given in all classrooms, as I found out later when I moved from this ambrosial world to the spin-dryer that was Filton High School in Bristol, a city comprehensive. There it was period eight, last of the day, with a bottom-set class of adolescents, that everyone dreaded, but I learned there everything I know about classroom control and how to discipline a rowdy room through timing and silence.

Three years in the Far East followed as I finally shed my West Country tethers, arriving at Sha Tin College in glittering, clattering Hong Kong. When the prospect of becoming a gin-and-tonic-swilling expat palled, I returned to the gloomier skies of England’s heart and Leicester Grammar School, where at the time, Richard III was still safely buried under a city centre car park. There I began my life in senior management, with the monitoring of skirt lengths, the removal of nail varnish and timetabling in my wide-ranging portfolio. I moved into girls’ education (much easier for an ambitious woman wanting to get to the top than staying with co-education, at that time) as deputy head at my mother’s old school, Queenswood in Hertfordshire, in 1992. When the headmistress, Audrey Butler, retired four years later, I was chosen to succeed her. My father, rarely a man to waste words on optimistic sentiment, beamed with pride: his girl was obviously as bossy as he was – what joy! Ten years followed, during which I also married and had two children, before the chance of running the schools’ equivalent of Manchester United came up. Elizabeth Diggory was to retire from St Paul’s. The stars were aligned, the timing was perfect and I came to lead my first and only London day school in September 2006.

Drawing upon my own experiences as a pupil, teacher, headmistress and mother, I have in mind as I write those who are parents of teenagers, particularly those bringing up girls. After twenty-five years in girls’ education, I have well-founded respect and admiration for the young women of this age group (though a few of them have almost driven me nuts) – with their optimism, their intelligence, their determination and their wonderful sense of humour. Whether or not the ‘girls’ school movement’, as it was once grandly called, survives – and that must be a question, despite the growing body of research defending the need for girls to be educated separately – there has to be continued attention paid to the education of girls, if the special talents and gifts they offer are to be brought out for the world’s greater benefit.

As a leader in education, seeing many common preoccupations across the sectors, I am also writing for anyone responsible for the work of others, where the task is to encourage a group of people to cohere behind a shared vision. Schools are exceptionally complex, with so many constituencies to read and keep happy: governors, staff, parents and students past, present and future, the general public, the government, the inspectorate and, for most independent schools while they remain charities, the Charity Commission. But the central elements of effective leadership are readily recognisable and transferable, so I offer observations from my own experience, including my mistakes, for the parallels others may smilingly draw with their own.

Finally, this book is for any person who wants simply to reflect on their own life, their opportunities and choices, and the unique path we each follow as we gradually make and remake ourselves: the inexorable process of becoming the person we are destined to be.

CHAPTER 1
September
Back to school – ‘the make-believe of a beginning’

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.

CHAPTER 2
October
A question of gender – still vindicating the rights of women?

The leaves are turning, the wind is gusting and I arrive in the office having lost yet another umbrella. As October starts, the academic year is well underway, corridors are humming with conversation and everyone is settling into the familiar rhythm of the term. In the admissions department, thoughts are already turning to next academic year, this being the month of open days for families considering applying to the school, so it’s time to brush up my speech for the prospective parents. It’s also the annual service in St Paul’s Cathedral, known as Colet Day, held jointly with St Paul’s Boys’ School, where each year we celebrate our foundation. Two reasons for me to be reflecting on John Colet’s vision for education, the case for single-sex schools, the education of girls in particular and what happens when girls will not be girls: in other words, the wider issue of gender identity schools are facing today.

Dean of St Paul’s, member of the Worshipful Company of Mercers and pioneering educationalist, John Colet used the fortune he inherited from his father to found St Paul’s boys’ school in 1509. At this time, the height of the Renaissance in England, Colet counted among his friends the great Dutch scholar Erasmus, who assisted both with writing textbooks and a Latin grammar for the school and with appointing staff. Colet also knew Thomas More, another progressive thinker and advocate of the education of women – his own daughter Margaret Roper becoming a distinguished classical scholar and translator. Amongst the early high masters of St Paul’s was Richard Mulcaster, appointed in 1596, who wrote extensively on education, advocating proper training for teachers and the development of a curriculum determined by aptitude rather than age. He too thought women should have access to formal education, including attending university. Another contemporary, Robert Ascham, became tutor to Queen Elizabeth I and was the author of The Scholemaster, published in 1570 after his death and which, as well as being a treatise on how to teach Latin prose composition, explored the psychology of learning and the need to educate the whole person. These were forward-thinking men. Widely travelled himself, Colet believed that education generally and his school in particular should be for the children ‘of all countres and nacions indifferently’ and that it should, as the humanists of the Renaissance believed, concentrate on developing the life of the mind through the study of Latin and Greek and the scholarship of antiquity, all of this becoming more achievable with the advent of printing. Colet was ambitious for his school as an institution of learning but also as an instrument of social change. Given this and the cultural climate in which the school was founded – a time of burgeoning exploration, discovery and scholarship – it is perhaps surprising that it took another 400 years for the Mercers’ Company to establish a girls’ school. But in 1904 they did, and as I was fond of telling prospective parents, by the early twenty-first century, we had more than made up for the time lost, the two schools by then equally established and known for their breadth of education and academic excellence. As a result of a developing bursary programme, they were also no longer just the preserve of the wealthy, but educating a widening range of bright children from across London, reflecting the cultural diversity of a capital city.

To the contemporary Paulina, with her characteristic wit and taste for unexpected juxtapositions, John Colet is part embodiment of her love of tradition and part teen icon. Colet’s unblinking black bust, staring straight out and dressed in austere sixteenth-century clericals, presiding over the long, black-and-white chequered corridor known as ‘The Marble’, often appears in the background of selfies, with added sunglasses or perhaps a Father Christmas hat. ‘John Colet rocks!’ the girls exclaim with affectionate irreverence. And Colet’s legacy is extraordinarily alive in the two schools today, where his vision finds fresh and contemporary expression. I feel sure that the addition of the girls’ school is something of which he would have wholeheartedly approved.

Colet Day itself is a high point in the calendar anticipated with great excitement. The vast cave of St Paul’s Cathedral with its unnerving acoustic (open your mouth and you think you are singing on your own – very disconcerting) is packed with proud parents and in the front rows, under the echoing dome, the two schools sit, flanked by their tutors. A monumental rustling as the organ swells and the service begins, the clergy processing and everyone rising to their feet, anticipating the ritual that is to come. Moving to the lectern to speak my allotted words (the high master and high mistress alternate their lines each year, in careful observance of equality) I wonder again about the respective characters of these two schools, with their brother and sister relationship of familial closeness and sibling rivalry, and whether one day they will become one. For the time being, Colet Day brings the two schools together in symbolic unity and the question dissolves unspoken in the air.

Whatever form schools take in the future, the length of time it has taken us to take seriously the education of girls must remain one of history’s great opportunity costs. We can reflect that despite the efforts of early pioneers, for all the women who have risen to prominence in the world, there are so many more whose capability and contribution have rested either unsung, unrealised or unfulfilled. That’s half the potential of any single generation. And when we talk about the education of women today, even though so much progress has been made, there is still always an underlying sense that we are righting a wrong, catching up with something which has been given insufficient importance and which now therefore needs special explanation or attention. As part of this, we are also still working out how women fit into the public, professional world and therefore to what kinds of roles they are best suited: are they bringing something different from men to strategy, to leadership, to getting things done? Should the fact of your gender be celebrated or ignored? While the debate continues, at school level the emphasis is overwhelmingly on integration. Worldwide, the modern default school model that is regarded as more ‘natural’ is not single-sex education but having boys and girls learning alongside one another in a co-educational setting. Single-sex schools might have been all right a hundred years ago, when girls were only just progressing from being taught refined accomplishments by governesses in the safe and sequestered setting of their homes, but that time has passed. This is the twenty-first century. Aren’t single-sex schools just an anachronism, encouraging outdated ways of thinking and walking out of step with the real world?

This is a question that cannot be sidestepped with sentimental appeals to custom and tradition. If single-sex education is to have a future, for girls or indeed for boys, it has to be not merely nice, but necessary. This means being based on something more than a nostalgic affection for how things used to be when time stood still and a school was its own little citadel, shut off from the real world like Hogwarts or St Trinian’s. Boys’ schools, perhaps because many are so long established, have not often felt the need to explain overtly the advantages they offer boys. Why would you, if you’ve been going strong for hundreds of years and produced many of the people (men) who have been the opinion formers and leaders of their day? And perhaps too with the prevailing attention being on addressing the needs of women, it hasn’t been easy for them to do so. As more and more boys’ schools admit girls to buttress their finances and academic profile, and boys-only establishments become a rarity, a few are now advancing their unique proposition with more clarity. Girls’ schools on the other hand have been in campaign mode from the start: the only way to educate girls properly is to educate girls only. But is it? Any movement championed by women for women faces challenges, not least having to weather being caricatured by some as shrill, desperate, unfeminine or just downright hoydenish – think of the suffragettes. At the same time advocates for girls’ schools have not always helped themselves by choosing the most robust and persuasive grounds on which to prevail. I’m a passionate believer myself in women’s education and empowerment, but not every argument for having girls educated separately is necessarily convincing and we do ourselves no good by appearing to grasp any new ‘proof’ instrumental to our cause.

I’m particularly dubious, for example, about there being a scientific, biological justification for girls’ schools. In a no doubt well-intentioned attempt to ensure their immortality, a body of so-called ‘science’ has developed arguing that girls need to be taught separately because they are neurologically different – they literally have differently wired brains and therefore it follows that they require teaching in special ways that would be wasted on boys but can make differently wired girls flourish. We can call this the ‘nature’ argument. A few years ago, for example, advocates of girls’ schools latched with great enthusiasm onto the work of the American psychologist JoAnn Deak and her book Girls Will Be Girls. Here was the ‘proof’ the girls’ school movement had been looking for. Along with a great deal of very sensible and pragmatic advice about the raising of daughters, Deak – renowned, as the cover blurb says, for her knowledge of ‘what makes girls tick’ – makes this claim: ‘brain research now clearly shows that the structure of the male and female brain is different at birth, apparently the result of oestrogen or testosterone shaping it in utero. In other words, female brains have more neurons in certain areas than male brains as a result of having more estrogen bathing them during fetal development.’[1] Bathed in oestrogen in the womb, the female brain also has a predisposition for effectiveness in certain cognitive areas: language facility, auditory skills, fine motor skills and sequential/detailed-thinking. Deak goes on to argue that the amygdala, the emotional centre of the brain, is especially sensitive in females, making them experience more frequent and more intense emotions. Given the biologically different nature of the male and female brains, both genders, she advises, need to spend time on activities that are counter to their neurological grain. To grow into properly balanced individuals, little girls should spend more time with building blocks and little boys in the drawing corner, and so on. You can see at once how its central point – that girls are wired differently – could be used by advocates of girls’ schools to propose an entire curriculum and approach to learning that would be uniquely girl-centred, justified – indeed essential – because the science says they need it.

Not everyone is so convinced by this correlation. The idea that men and women are biologically different in more ways than the obvious is explored with some vigour by Cordelia Fine in her wonderfully acerbic book, Delusions of Gender. The clue is in the title: Fine ruthlessly demolishes what she sees as the dubious scientific proofs of the neurological differences between men and women and the so-called male and female brains. Distinguishing between the brain as a biological structure and the more complex notion of the mind, and surveying hundreds of years’ worth of evidence which has been used to build the concept of ‘neurosexism’, she points to the fact that in a world where we love referencing gender differences and learn to do so from very early childhood, time and time again those differences are seen to be derived as much – or more – from our own preconceptions, born of social customs about the characteristics of gender, as from any actual physiological evidence. In other words, for her it’s about nurture rather than nature.

Fine argues that men and women behave and perform certain tasks differently, and might presumably also learn differently, not so much because of any intrinsic neurological difference but because they are fulfilling a social expectation. Society and the self thus become reciprocally defining – the one informs and reinforces the other. Here for example is what she has to say about housework and who does it:

In families with children in which both spouses work full time, women do about twice as much childcare and housework as men – the notorious ‘second shift’ … You might think that, even if this isn’t quite fair, it’s nonetheless rational. When one person earns more than the other then he (most likely) enjoys greater bargaining power at the trade union negotiations that, for some, become their marriage. Certainly, in line with this unromantic logic, as a woman’s financial contribution approaches that of her husband’s, her housework decreases. It doesn’t actually become quite equitable, you understand. Just less unequal. But only up to the point at which her earnings equal his. After that – when she starts to earn more than him – something very curious starts to happen. The more she earns, the more housework she does …

What on earth could be behind this extraordinary injustice in which she returns home from a hard day at work to run the vacuum cleaner under his well-rested legs? A few popular writers have made some creative suggestions. John Gray, author of the Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus books, has recently made a valiant stab at arguing that performing routine housework chores is actually selectively beneficial to women, including – if not especially – those with demanding jobs. His idea (which to my knowledge has not been empirically tested) is that because the modern woman has removed herself from her traditional home sphere with its babies, children and friends on whom to call with a pot roast, she has dangerously low levels of oxytocin coursing through her blood. (Oxytocin is a mammalian hormone associated with social bonding and social interactions.) Thankfully, however, ‘nurturing oxytocin-producing domestic routine duties like laundry, shopping, cooking and cleaning’ are available in plentiful supply. Phew! Such chores, however, have a very ill effect on men. For them, the priority is testosterone-producing tasks – for without the stimulating rush of that sex hormone, men become little better than limp rags (and not even ones that wipe themselves along the countertops).[2]

This fascinating debate will go on, but I’m inclined to agree with Cordelia Fine that the perceived differences in behaviour – and as part of that, learning preferences – are more to do with cultural and social influences than biology. In my experience, generally speaking, there are certain ways in which girls and boys tend to differ in their habits and behaviours. I say tend. Of course I know more about the girls – based on twenty-odd years of leading girls’ schools I can say for example that the girls I have known are often inclined to be self-critical, to be more concerned than their brothers about getting things right first time, to be dutifully good at planning and completing things (which is why they sometimes do better when assessed continuously and less well if taking exams). They are also sensitive to social dynamics and can read the subtext of conversations and behaviours very skilfully. This of course is linked both to why they value and nurture lasting friendships as well as why they are also so much better than boys at bullying. Where boys are inclined just to hit one other, girls can torture one another slowly over weeks using only gestures of their eyebrows, making the behaviour so much harder to detect and pin down. I also know that generalising is dangerous and there are many girls at St Paul’s who would pull me up for stereotyping and say they didn’t recognise themselves here. But actually these are my general observations, based on the 25,000 or so girls I have known. The question for us here is not so much whether they are different from boys – which in my opinion they are – but more how does that difference come about? Are girls born different, or is it that society makes them so because of its expectations? What actually can we say to justify educating girls (and therefore boys) separately?

In many ways, when I hear recent leavers from St Paul’s who are now making their way in professional life talk about their experiences, it is more and more clear to me that girls’ schools are indeed oddly out of step with some of the ‘realities’ of the so-called modern working world. In a well-regarded modern company, for example, a Paulina in her thirties told me recently how she was surprised at having to fend off the unwelcome advances of a more senior male colleague at work who would approach her desk, stand too close and suggest drinks after hours. When I asked why she didn’t tell him to get lost, she replied that as he controlled her promotion prospects and her pay, she had to be very careful. Another told me that when the male staff packed up on Fridays early to go and play football and she asked to join them, she was told that wasn’t how it worked and she might like to go and have a manicure instead. We may be providing a stimulating intellectual experience and nurturing a love of scholarship, but as regards preparation for life and work, our messages – our assumptions – about equality are by some standards hopelessly off-message. Because it turns out that the real world has a long way to go and still needs a great deal of cleaning up.

The disconnect is simple: at a school like St Paul’s (or Queenswood, or Sunny Hill where I was a pupil, or at most girls’ schools I’m aware of), girls learn an instinctive, fundamental confidence that far from being girl specific, has nothing to do with their gender. As one alumna wrote in a survey carried out amongst the 25–35-year-olds who had been to St Paul’s, ‘We commanded respect in our very nature.’ Note that masculine-sounding word ‘commanded’ which she uses without self-consciousness. Paulinas, along with other girls’ school-educated young women, assume that their opinions are of intrinsic interest, and are even happy to revise those opinions, as one inspection report memorably suggested, ‘if convincing evidence is put before them’. They take themselves seriously in the best way: they have never been taught to ‘play nicely’ because they are girls, to assume they will be less talented at science and maths, to defer to male opinion because it is more loudly expressed, or to assume they are being educated to be the wives of top men. If they are articulate, confident and full of opinions (as they tend to be) they do not expect to be treated as if this were unusual and slightly unfeminine, or actually rather admirable, given they are only girls. They enjoy sport, but generally prefer to play it rather than be WAGs on the touchline, watching their brothers and boyfriends play rugby. If the school play is Macbeth, they assume it is not beyond the talents of one of them to play the main part – in fact to play all the parts. In short, they think they can do pretty well anything, because at school, they can.

When they emerge into a workplace and a wider society which rather lags behind in that everything is still pretty much weighted in favour of men, where organisations work according to male tastes, behaviours and preferences, they just don’t get it. One former head girl, who visited St Paul’s to address the students about her career in the decade since leaving, put it this way: ‘I just had no idea that it would be so much more challenging making your career as a woman – at school, it never occurred to us – everything seemed possible.’

Everything seemed possible because it was. Despite some progress, the realities in the so-called ‘wider world’ of unequal pay, unequal promotion prospects and unequal opportunities generally are a continuing concern to everyone who would wish to see society benefiting – equally – from the talents of both men and women. Girls go out into the workplace, full of confidence and capability, and come up against a very different culture: at one extreme, they may be subjected to active prejudice or harassment: being excluded from the Friday afternoon game of football or being pursued by the older boss. But equally disturbing is that experience that some women describe of becoming invisible – their views going unheard or ignored. This was a new idea to me until comparatively recently; I experienced it for the first time myself when attending the conference of a traditionally male-dominated professional organisation. It was a very odd feeling standing in a circle at a drinks reception and feeling like a pane of glass – I could easily have disappeared without anyone noticing. Ah, so this is what they talk about, I thought.

Change is afoot in some quarters, stimulated by the more recent opening up of the question of gender identity. A case in point was the decision in summer 2017 by the then newly appointed (female) artistic director of the Globe Theatre, Michelle Terry, to commit to ‘gender-blind’ casting and a 50/50 split of male and female roles – presumably because, otherwise, men would be getting the lion’s share of the great Shakespearean parts, as they always have done. This is great, but I reflected that in girls’ schools, gender-sighted – rather than gender-blind – casting in drama productions has always ensured that women win not just half, but all the most significant roles, producing generations of practised Macbeths, Hamlets and Henry Vs. It was with some satisfaction that I thought how well prepared these girls’ school-educated actors would be for the new and more empowering approach to casting at the Globe. That even-handedness and neutrality is of course emphasised further when we also see men playing female roles with great brilliance: who can forget Mark Rylance as Olivia in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, for example. Twice as many actors to choose from, twice as many roles to audition for, and it becomes about talent and skill, not about the limitations of gender.

This is all very well, say the detractors of single-sex schools, but the real world is mixed – what’s the point of pretending otherwise? Girls just have to get used to it (which usually means playing nicely to get what they want), so they might as well start at school. Of course education must prepare young people for reality, for society as it is. But it must and can do more: inform and drive the values by which that society is shaped. When all things are equal – my former head girl and I agreed – there may be no further need for single-gender schools. But it seems that despite some excellent work going on to change things (spearheaded by men as well as women) we are still very far from that point. Until then, St Paul’s and its fellow girls’ schools have a vital and influential role to play in ensuring the continued disruption of social norms, so long established that no one even thinks of them as norms. The impetus towards genuine equality cannot be assumed but must be actively led by the talented and confident young women emerging from our gates. Whether girls are wired differently or not really does not matter in the end. Either way, what we’re dealing with is a society that has deep-rooted, often subconscious expectations about women and structures which still limit the contribution they can make. While this is so, we need to educate girls themselves to change that. The case for girls’ schools is as much about preparation for what is to come, as it is about the experience of the here and now.

So what do girls’ schools do differently? Many things. By freeing girls to be themselves so they don’t feel the pressure to conform to predetermined patterns of behaviour, girls’ schools make them more aware of how the media seeks to manipulate them. They train a lens on the problem to make girls think critically. In doing so, they give a framework to evaluate the image of girls in today’s media. Is that the image we want for ourselves? What is the image of female attractiveness to which young women are taught to aspire, for example? Who is shaping it? The insidious encouragement to conform to an absurd idea of beauty embodied by emaciated fashion models has, for example, caused great damage to many young women’s self-esteem and health. We want them to pay attention to this and develop the resilience to reject it, because nobody else is going to in an industry that is making money out of controlling them in this way. When the then editor of Vogue, Alexandra Shulman (a Paulina herself) came to talk to the girls at St Paul’s about her career in fashion journalism, as part of the weekly Friday lecture programme, this highly intelligent, unexpectedly normal-looking woman – chic in a reassuringly rumpled way – was asked by one of the girls what she was doing about the fact that Vogue’s models looked ‘emaciated’. Her magazine was still implicitly promoting the idea that size zero should be every girl’s dream. Her reply was that she saw the problem but this was down to the designers: with clothes being created for tiny figures, fashion editors could only provide tiny models to wear them. I looked at the faces of her difficult-to-impress audience and saw politeness warring with scepticism. Surely this was an issue on which a female-run magazine like Vogue should be making more of a stand? As so often, it was in the post-lecture informal conversations that the most interesting thinking emerged; here about the tension between principles and commercial imperatives – an example of how a girls’ school can give time to foregrounding a subject of special significance for women and enable untrammelled discussion.

Girls’ schools don’t just concentrate on protecting their pupils: they also empower them, confidently promoting a positive ‘can-do’ philosophy. There are no barriers, real or perceived. In terms of academic life, for example, girls do not face unspoken prejudices about subject choices. No one is particularly amazed that you like physics. An enormous amount has been written about why physics is seen as a male subject: more boys take it at A level and beyond so it is seen as inhospitable to girls; it is associated with ‘hard’ skills, such as making circuits, which are typically perceived as isolated and not involved with other people, and hence also ‘unfeminine’. Textbooks also tend to employ traditionally boy-friendly examples, such as car construction. All this is changing gradually, but physics is still a subject where girls are having to fit in. That said, and somewhat to my surprise, I was gratified to learn about a recent international initiative to encourage more young people into engineering through designing, 3D printing and racing Formula One-inspired cars. This scheme, F1 in Schools, has attracted girls in large numbers. Where the girls win out is in the leadership and organisation: the mixed teams have proved more successful in galvanising themselves to raise funds and see through the project than those with boys only, and guess what? The most successful teams of all are those who have a girl as the leader.

The great head start in a girls’ school of course is that the whole curriculum is tailored to their interests. There is no subject area or activity in which girls do not excel or are seen as less apt or capable, or where their capability is seen as somehow surprising or counter-cultural. The scientists are all girls, as are all the mathematicians. The significance of this has been highlighted in a new way now that we are seeing so much more emphasis on capability in the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) and their link to higher pay. In the summer of 2017, Emma Duncan wrote a very well-researched article for The Times (‘Maths for girls is the way to close the pay gap’) arguing that as the best-paid jobs are in technology and computing, and as boys tend to choose maths more often and do better at it than girls, the answer to closing the pay gap is to have more girls do maths. This recommendation is already long since in place in girls’ schools, where maths and science are not, and never have been, seen as boys’ subjects – where so-called ‘maths anxiety’ isn’t a thing and where girls take up these subjects with all the enthusiasm and confidence you could wish. The Girls’ Schools Association, for example, analyses the take-up of all A-level subjects in its schools against national data, revealing that a girl educated in a GSA school is twice as likely to take maths and two and a half times as likely to take physics as her peers in all other schools taken together. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the numbers applying to read physical sciences, medicine and dentistry at university from GSA schools far outstrip national figures.

As well as giving them unprejudiced access to the curriculum, training women to expect to lead is also a vital part of their education. A girls’ school is fertile ground for the emerging leader as there are so many opportunities to take initiative and show responsibility. In most schools, you can aspire to be form captain – or library monitor, or playground helper, or lunch queue supervisor – from the age of eleven. Later you may graduate to being on the school council or being captain of a sports team. And eventually you may reach the heights of house captain or even prefect. I recently saw a magazine advertising the open day of a distinguished co-ed competitor of ours in London. The photograph showed two smartly dressed senior pupils: a dark-haired boy looking confidently out at the camera and a blonde-haired girl, a little shorter as shown in the picture, looking happily up at him. Here was an image of confident leadership, certainly, but what an unfortunate and presumably unconscious message about gender. In a girls’ school, there is no question of being marginalised: girls hold all the senior leadership positions; all sports teams have a female captain, the first violin in the orchestra is always a girl and, as we’ve seen, girls get the chance to play the leading roles, whatever the school play.

Those youngest girls who joined a month or so ago are getting to know one another, gradually piecing together their independent world of school, letting their parents into it a little, inviting them to watch their netball matches, or describing their teachers perhaps – and all the time keenly observing the older girls and their ways. As they become more confident, they become bolder: the senior girls say to me (as they do every year): ‘We were never as confident as that! I used to be terrified of the girls in the senior school! Yesterday I actually saw a MIV girl roll her eyes when I told her to go to the back of the lunch queue! What’s happened?’ So the new ones are settling in well, I’d think wryly … The desire to lead and the confidence for it is often there from an early age and will receive regular encouragement throughout the school.

Some of my most rewarding times as a head have been spent with these all-female student leadership teams. The moment of appointing the new head girl was always a particular high point, making up as it did for some of the less edifying exchanges that occasionally took place in my office. The girl would arrive having been sent to see me. She must have had a good idea of the reason but could not be quite certain. The door would open and I’d invite her in. A cautious, slightly stilted exchange ensued:

‘Juliet, with the strong support you have received from your peers and from the staff, I’m delighted to invite you to become the next head girl. Of course I mustn’t assume you would want this … What do you say?’

‘Err … thank you very much …?’

‘I mean … you’d like to accept? You’ll be happy to do it?’

‘Totally … Yes!’

And as she struggled to contain her delight in an attempt to convince as being entirely unflappable and mature, we would go on to discuss the practicalities of the announcement, before inviting in and appointing, together, the deputy head girl and team of prefects. By the time they had all been sitting shifting uneasily on my sofas stealing glances at each other with polite restraint for ten minutes, I realised they were about to burst so would release them into the school – hearing, once they thought themselves out of earshot, an explosion of excited mutual congratulation and pent-up laughter.

The novelty over, it was impressive to see how quickly these teams would organise themselves without fuss, choosing the areas to work on during the year and hatching plans: building relationships with the younger year groups to tackle friendship issues or bullying; giving an assembly on phubbing (no, I didn’t know what it meant either: it’s tapping away on your phone when someone is trying to speak to you – a form of ‘snubbing’) or helping with revision strategy for those taking GCSE. I loved to watch the economical efficiency with which they would divide up a problem, assign tasks, get things done. And of course I watched them learning some of the lessons of leadership: the challenges of getting large groups to work together, the difficulty of fronting something your peers don’t necessarily like (‘Look, guys, we have to get to morning registration on time … okay? Just get over it’); the difference between the people who talk and those who get things done. It was with both sympathy and amusement I watched them one year plan their summer ball in liaison with the boys’ school prefect team, which obviously had more pressing things to think about:

‘How’s everything going with the ball?’

‘Well … We met with them [the boys] last week and they hadn’t really done anything since the previous meeting? They kind of just sat around wanting to know if they could bring their plus-ones … Why would we want girls from other schools at our ball? I mean … Then they were just arguing about the price. So we’re going to see some venues this weekend. Do they actually even care if this gets organised?’

Those girls were important role models for the younger students. In a girls’ school, there are also strong role models of female leadership amongst the staff. While there are of course female heads of mixed schools, and even of boys’ schools, male head teachers still predominate, especially in the private sector. In girls’ schools, girls learn that it’s normal for a woman to be in charge and that just as girls aren’t expected to prefer certain subjects, women don’t have to be the ones fulfilling the more traditionally pastoral or caring roles, underlining gender expectations about their skills and preferences. A woman can be pastoral deputy head but she can also be finance director – or indeed take on any other responsibility that interests her without it seeming unusual.

Importantly, it isn’t only girls who need to learn to accept and be at ease with the idea of female leadership – boys do too. Many of the boys growing up in today’s schools will find themselves working for female bosses; if this seems awkward to them, they will be at a disadvantage. The key at school level is for the staff to model relationships of genuine equality and unforced mutual respect. To that end, schools should try to ensure they do not have a predominantly single gender common room but one where roles of responsibility and leadership are held by both men and women. Boys’ schools might look to ensure that they have women in their senior leadership teams (and not only in pastoral posts, where they underscore the idea that women are best at looking after people) and girls’ schools should welcome employing capable men, including in those posts. I found it hugely beneficial and enriching in both the schools I led to have a mixed staff team, adding to the diversity of perspective and demonstrating to the girls that talented men had no difficulty in working with a female leader; to work in a girls’ school was to be a modern man, not to be emasculated and therefore commit career suicide. But perhaps the ultimate female role model was created when a much-admired and well-liked member of the senior leadership team at St Paul’s became the first woman in the 700-year history of Eton College to be appointed as its ‘lower master’, the most senior education post after the headship itself. This was an immensely proud and exciting moment for both schools – proof if it were needed that girls can indeed aspire to do anything.

A girls’ school then is where tomorrow’s women can really flex their capability, expand into all areas of potential interest and revel in learning for its own sake. They can unselfconsciously display their intelligence and curiosity, regardless of those powerful age-determined notions of popularity, attractiveness or peer pressure. Even super-confident Paulinas report that they don’t necessarily do this in a mixed group, where even bright girls can have a tendency to check themselves and to dumb themselves down, especially if hormones are coursing round the system and getting mixed up with the brainpower. Where girls are accustomed to being heard and being valued for who they are, irrespective of what they look like or what they wear (did we have to endure so many cartoons of Theresa May’s animal-print shoes?), they are encouraged in their capacities as confident individuals, leaders and agents of change.

Every school has its own personality which is only partly a matter of whether it educates boys, girls, or both. As the head of a girls’ school with a brother school just across the river, I had ample chance to think about the benefits and drawbacks of single-sex education in relation to two specific institutions. I came to know St Paul’s boys’ school in both a professional and personal capacity, because my son Adam was a pupil there, thriving on the academic stimulation and strong sense of tradition. As a mother I liked the proudly masculine ethos, in which personal responsibility and brotherliness were encouraged through the vertical tutor system, where boys of different ages were grouped together in a form. I saw my son grow in confidence, forging respectful and friendly relationships with his teachers, loving sport and then loving acting even more, learning to look up to older boys and look out for younger ones while building lasting friendships. The ‘Paulines’ I encountered hanging out in my kitchen were likeable, well-grounded young men who knew how to speak to adults in a natural way, neither gauche nor ingratiating. They teased each other mercilessly but were essentially kind and I saw that there was room for gentleness in this version of masculinity. The large school site, the generous rolling pitches (unusual to have so much green space in a London school) where rugby and cricket are passionately played and which lead down to the river, underline an expansive and confident sense of identity. Did I feel that my son was missing out because there were no girls in the school? No. True, he had a sister at home with all the independence of mind a mother could wish, but there was no sense to me – or to him – of something missing. He was busy, stimulated, committed: growing up in a healthy environment that was thoroughly positive and right for him.

The girls’ school I came to know quite differently, both more intimately and less objectively. I loved it as my home and my all-consuming project for eleven years. As you look at the school across Brook Green, it is a fine prospect. Gerald Horsley’s elegant main building of rose-coloured brick and white Portland stone is set off nowadays by elegant green and white landscaping behind the clipped hedges and curled ironwork. It has an orderly grace. As one of the first purpose-built schools for girls, this is where some of the most prominent intellectuals and thinkers of the twentieth century were schooled: former pupils, or Paulinas, as they are called (never Old Paulinas) include Rosalind Franklin, Kathleen Kenyon, Shirley Williams and Jessica Rawson, as well as those who have carved their original careers in other fields, such as actresses Celia Johnson and Rachel Weisz. Its smaller, compact and more urban site and buildings feel scholarly and focussed, the setting for a fierce sense of the pioneering spirit of women’s education, marked by a secular foundation, a commitment to liberal learning and a confident emphasis on independence of mind – the policy of having no uniform is matched by having remarkably few rules. All this can make some of the Paulinas, these latter-day bluestockings with their steady gaze, ripped jeans and dyed hair, somewhat daunting. Known for their quick intellect and an uncompromising mental tenacity, their reputation for asking awkward questions can make eminent speakers quite nervous while waiting in the wings to deliver a lecture. They are unconventional, individualistic and confident. As one of my son’s friends summed it up, while a sixth-former at the boys’ school: ‘We are just fairly normal guys, know what I mean? Your girls, well … they are just – you know – more out there …’ Yes, more out there perhaps, but also wonderfully warm, informal, friendly and completely unstuffy. That pungent, irrepressible sense of intellectual curiosity is all-pervasive while, as my predecessor Elizabeth Diggory beautifully put it, the classrooms and corridors ring with laughter.

Schools develop their particular character according to location, tradition, culture, the built environment, the pupils and, perhaps most of all, the cast of characters that make up the staff. So, here we have two very different schools, each with its own distinctive qualities. Would we really want to combine them and have just one, large, vanilla sundae? The lively balance between mutual respect and competition always seemed to me a good thing and in no way impeded the continuing conversation about how we might work more closely together. We all enjoyed doing so. Despite the unignorable and inconvenient geographical fact of the River Thames dividing us, necessitating a brisk thirty-minute walk across green-and-gold Hammersmith Bridge, there had long been joint plays; shared university preparation classes in some subjects (notably in my time English and economics) were working well, joint musical concerts had seen a renaissance and by the time I left in 2017, a shared sixth-form conference was in the making. Rowing was another obvious area for collaboration. All this provided excellent opportunities for the students of both schools, who could learn from each other. I would hear about ‘uni prep’ in my Friday morning break-time meetings with the head girl and her team:

‘How was uni prep this week?’

‘The boys are so, like, confident! They just come out with stuff.’

‘Actually I thought what Ben said was pretty rubbish …’

‘Didn’t you speak up and say you disagreed with him?’

‘Oh, Angus was already saying something else …’

‘True, he was talking a lot, but then when Sophie said that thing about the symbolism in the second text he obviously hadn’t actually read it …’

The girls in this group could work on their proactivity and risk-taking in debate which would serve them well at a university interview, and the boys could consider doing the reading thoroughly in advance rather than winging it. The best of both worlds, perhaps, but there was a tacit understanding that neither they nor we would want to compromise and lose our prized independence.

Passionate though I am about girls’ schools, necessary though I absolutely believe they are with the exhilarating experience they can give young women, it would be narrow-minded to say that all really good schools are single sex: excellence comes in many forms. When I look back at my time at Sha Tin College in Hong Kong, for example, where I taught English and Drama and had huge fun directing plays and setting up the first sixth form, Sha Tin was mixed, like most international schools, and I can’t say that the education of the girls was weakened by the presence of the boys. The students there were mostly resilient, well-travelled children used to their parents moving around the world and having to adapt to new schools and make new friends quickly. It was a school typical of its type: students and teachers on first-name terms, no uniform, with a breezy, energetic and entrepreneurial approach to life, much of which was lived outdoors. I remember the students there as open, confident and well balanced. Perhaps the more mature girls occasionally became frustrated with the horsing around some of the boys did in play rehearsals, and how, maddeningly, they didn’t learn their lines until the last minute, but there was much give and take. Since leaving headship and working now in the international schools world, I have seen many more examples of an empowering culture within mixed schools.

These schools thrive because, on the whole, they are populated by modern, mobile families with wide horizons, amongst whom it is not difficult to create pools of liberal and enlightened thinking. A number have been founded by talented and bold female entrepreneurs, which in my post-headship life as an adviser, it has been a wonderful privilege to get to know. But co-educational schools at large are not changing the game in society for the next generation of women. In order to do that, and to ensure that young women go out into the world ready and confident to take on the challenges and inequities they still face, the case for girls having the opportunity to be educated separately remains strong. Paulinas, in those same formative years, are laying down foundations of confidence about their intrinsic worth and ability which are not being modulated or diluted, however unconsciously, by marginalising or stereotyped attitudes to women and girls, by being photographed next to a boy who looks ahead as she looks at him, by attitudes so deep-seated and long-standing that they soundlessly permeate the very walls of the institution.

Taking a step back as an educator and looking at provision both nationally and internationally, I think the most important things of all are that there should be consistency of quality and diversity of choice for parents. No school deserves to continue just because it’s a girls’ school, if what it offers is not providing the best for the children. Schools that know what they are and what they do well, that are distinctive and coherent in their ethos and values, allow parents and children to make informed decisions for the future. That choice requires the schools to help by being very clear about what they are as well as what they are not, helping parents cut through any hearsay and mythology and see the school as clearly and truthfully as possible. As the October trees blew about on Brook Green, and with the elegant facade of the French school opposite becoming more visible as the brown leaves curled and fell, I would find myself looking out of the study window thinking through all this afresh, as I prepared to describe the culture of St Paul’s to prospective parents. It was autumn and therefore the season when parents would be spending their Saturdays doing the rounds of the London schools: the first stage of the eleven-plus entry process that would take their children to new senior schools the following September.

Open days were very important to us, not simply because we needed to set out our stall and make sure there were going to be sufficient applicants of the right calibre for the hundred-plus places we would offer after the entrance exam in January (contrary to popular myth, St Paul’s is by no means the most heavily oversubscribed school in London, perhaps partly as a result of its forbidding academic reputation) but also because with so much misinformation out there, we were on a mission to get the school properly understood.

Looking back, and perhaps ironically, I never felt it necessary to make a particular point about St Paul’s being a girls’ school. You surely felt the special power of confident but unparaded female capability the minute you stepped through the doors: the school in all its distinctive individuality largely spoke for itself, as all schools must do. At the same time I would try to explode some of the myths: we were not a hothouse where we were boiling up the girls to the highest temperature to pass exams – we were providing an exciting environment for learning, with teachers who were leaders in their field, still learning themselves; we were not negligent about the girls’ happiness and well-being but put that at the heart of their education by getting to know them as individuals, encouraging independence while at the same time building a sense of community and mutual responsibility. Whatever your prejudices, I told them, leave those at the door and look at the school with fresh eyes so that you can make up your own mind.

Naturally enough, the school spoke most powerfully not through messages delivered by me, or by the senior staff, however carefully composed and genuinely meant, but simply through the personalities of the girls themselves: articulate, enthusiastic, confident, authentic and bubbling over with pride to show the visitors their school. Being a girls’ school is simply one facet – albeit an important one – of the unique character of St Paul’s and that is expressed most tellingly and persuasively through the individuals that shape and are shaped by it. I believe in parents and their children having choice and here, for the right girl, was one distinctive and compelling one, spread out to be looked at, to taste and wonder at, and if the affinity was really there, of which to become a part.

So, when parents asked me, as they often did, to help them weigh up the pros and cons of single-sex versus co-ed for their daughter, as if there was a right answer, I would encourage them to think not in binary terms but about the particular ethos of each of the schools they were considering. For any parent, choosing a school for your child feels a momentous decision. And although there will be many aspects which can be rationally assessed – academic standards, provision for sport or the creative arts, location, single sex or co-ed, size of school – the most important consideration of all is what I would call alignment of values. To put it simply, will you feel comfortable leaving your child in the care of those people all day (or all term, or for five to seven years?). Are their values your values? Does it feel right? Better sometimes to set aside the rational considerations, stop overthinking it and just listen to that simple gut instinct about whether you and the school to which you are thinking of entrusting your child see the world in the same way.

All that said, and while I believe that excellent education comes in many forms, there is still a vital, contemporary role for girls’ schools. Caricaturing them in a sentimental way because they represent a certain tradition or because they evoke a kind of Daisy Pulls It Off nostalgia may be amusing but it obscures what they are there to achieve in today’s world. They are important because they anticipate what we hope and believe will be the future for women: breathing the clear blue air of their capability without a thought to any limitation born of gender. So while the society into which young people emerge remains as unequal in its attitudes and opportunities as it still – sadly, shockingly – is, there will continue to be a role for girls’ schools to concentrate on developing resilient, clever, capable young women to take on the pressure and change it. So far from their being an anachronism, in fact, it turns out that girls’ schools are ahead of their time – the problem is that society isn’t quite ready for the young women educated in them. There is an argument about adapting to the realities, and I am thoughtful when people say that girls need to get used to the ‘real world’ that is out there. But how long are we going to wait before the gender pay gap is closed, or the excellent work of the 30% Club is replaced by the achievements of the 50% Club? Schools are not there merely to prepare young people to conform to society: they are about the future. The role of schools is to shape change. I don’t believe that learning to ‘adapt’ earlier – which all too often means learning how to play nicely, avoid appearing too clever, succeed by flirting and conform to male expectations of what you will be good at – is, in the long term, what girls should be doing.

Emerging from a culture as empowering for girls as St Paul’s may be a shock. But I like it that Paulinas are shocked at what they find. They should be. If they are not being accorded equal treatment, taken advantage of as ‘diligent’ rather than brilliant by being given the dull but necessary work on which their male colleagues build their success (as one young alumna described her life at a well-known investment bank), balancing on their heels at the edge of the pub conversation about rugby and cars while the boys network their way to promotion, then I want them to be shocked. I want them not to be ready for that and I don’t want them to adapt. I want their secure sense of self and their deep confidence in their own capability, developed brick-by-rose-coloured brick at school, to give them the courage and clarity to drive change.

But it’s time to talk about the other 50 per cent of humanity – the men. I want to reassure the men reading this book (I hope you’re out there still and haven’t rushed off to do the online shop or finish the vacuuming) that the answer is certainly not to demonise the male sex and hold them generally responsible for all the inequalities that women face. I admit we indulged in some affectionate teasing behind closed doors at St Paul’s – as I’m sure happened too at our expense across the river – but seriously, we have to guard against slipping into lazy caricature here. In our zeal to make society more equal, we women would do well to keep in mind that alienating men is not going to help us. There is a particular problem for the many enlightened men in the world who actually get all of this completely, because perhaps unavoidably they end up having to share responsibility for the legacy of prejudice and unfairness that women have faced for so long. But the result is that many of them, great modern sons, husbands and fathers who support and respect the women in their lives totally, need to feel they have a role and a voice. Why shut them out? They can’t help us if they are castigated for just being men. Driving the important changes must come through cooperation, with men and women acknowledging the issues and working together, not in opposition.

Which brings me to Dads4Daughters and why we launched an initiative at St Paul’s to harness historic male advantage and make it work for us, and why the dads loved it.

A few years ago I became aware of the United Nation’s campaign HeForShe through a powerful speech given by actress Emma Watson. HeForShe is a call to action for men and women and challenges one half of humanity – men – to get behind the inequalities of opportunity faced by women in society and unite with women to bring about change. This simple but crucial idea of unity rather than opposition struck me as having a very particular application in a girls’ school where, often, young women are being endorsed and supported in their education by their fathers who have been part of the decision to send them there. Putting it simply, if you are the father of a clever daughter, you are certainly not going to choose St Paul’s unless you believe in female empowerment. So snatching the term almost out of the air I chose my valedictory address to the leavers and their parents to launch our own version of the UN campaign, calling it Dads4Daughters.

We started by inviting fathers to write guest articles for our fortnightly newsletter about their view from the workplace and this produced an enthusiastic response. Through it we learned not just about the problems but about various very effective practices – for example reverse mentoring, where an older man is mentored by a less experienced, younger woman who is able to help him look critically at his behaviour towards female colleagues and call him out for evidence of bias that may be so ingrained that it’s unconscious. She will check his use of language (grown-up women don’t like being referred to as girls or being described as ‘feisty’), his assumptions about gender roles (women are not automatically better at making tea or taking notes) and will help him see the world more clearly from the female perspective. The father who described this process called it ‘the best professional development I have ever had’. Not because he was rampantly prejudiced – far from it – but because it made him so much more aware of his own behaviour.

The survey of our alumnae in the 25–35 age group produced the shocking finding that well over 75 per cent had encountered or been aware of workplace prejudice. At our launch event in school, we looked at the findings and heard the personal experiences of some of them as well as some fathers. It was wonderful to see how many fathers wanted to come into school for this event, with their daughters, and spend time talking about a matter of such importance to them both. This was a new alignment; fathers loved having a reason to spend time with their daughters, we found – we were tapping into something they really cared about.

Further, it was surprising to discover that many men who had become fathers had never been asked about it in their workplace and this cataclysmic event in a couple’s life was seen as solely the experience – and the responsibility – of the mother. No one wondered if they had had enough sleep or needed some flexibility to assist with childcare. Becoming a dad just wasn’t a thing. Dads4Daughters was morphing into Daughters4Dads – a new awareness of the role of the father in his daughter’s life. By now we were also thinking much more broadly about parenthood and its value. It was listening to a talk by St Paul’s alumna Annie Auerbach of the company Starling, who ‘solve business problems through cultural insight’, that I began to see how being a parent, far from undermining your ability to be a professional, could actually enhance it. Parents, Annie explained to the audience, leaning forward in her even, modern, graciously unassailable way, are not just resilient and adaptable; they have stamina, they are problem-solvers, they have patience, they are lateral-thinkers and they are expert in seeing things from someone else’s point of view. Who wouldn’t want these qualities in their boss or their subordinate? It’s time we saw being a parent – whether father or mother – as something to be proud of, adding to our humanity and capability, adding to our professional value too, rather than something to apologise for or be silent about as if it had nothing to do with the people we are when we go to work.

The power of the intergenerational blood tie that Dads4Daughters unlocked is of course nothing new. I’ve since read a number of studies underlining the powerful effect that having daughters has on a man’s decision-making at work. For example, Iris Bohnet in her book What Works: Gender Equality by Design cites a study showing that male CEOs with daughters are much more likely to promote women into higher levels of management. So there may still be a long way to go, but regardless of any formal initiative, fathers of daughters can lead the way in encouraging greater workplace equality. And what better place to start than the fathers of daughters at girls’ schools? The answer has to be for men and women to work together on this: for men to use their influence to effect change and to make equality normal. It isn’t a women’s issue any more, it’s an issue for society as a whole, and I feel very optimistic that the rising generation will get over the adversarial attitudes of the past and bring about real change.

Nothing stands still and the advent of new thinking about gender has made the debate more complex still: what about the future of girls’ schools in a world where your gender is a matter of choice? Over a period of several months during 2017, as more and more articles appeared in the press telling the personal stories of individuals who had transitioned and giving accounts of students confronting nonplussed authorities about perceptions of gender, their right to adopt gender-neutral pronouns and their demand for gender-neutral bathrooms, it became clear that we had our own gender conversation emerging within the school. Although at that time the issue did not yet seem to be exercising schools all over the country (at the national conference for deputy head teachers the question was greeted with bewilderment by some colleagues), the London schools were seeing their own first cases of individuals either transitioning or requesting non-binary identities to be respected. This was an entirely new minefield for a school to navigate. Exploration of sexuality was one thing, and in a thoughtful, tolerant and liberal school, something which had long been acknowledged as a life issue and did not normally cause great difficulty if it needed to be discussed. The St Paul’s students had their own (then) LGBT society whose meetings were advertised in morning assembly. But the concept of gender identity was something quite new. How to harness the natural appetite of bright students to discuss and debate the issue, to care for the needs of individuals with a genuine personal quest or dilemma and all that went with that in terms of family attitudes, how to steer a steady course within the realism of the law as it affected our status as a gender-specific school and how not to be derailed by a potential ‘trans-trender’ element who might see this as a new and exciting way to create turbulence and challenge the conservatism of an older generation? It was an interesting management challenge.

As with any emerging issue the most important thing was to get onto the front foot by initiating discussion with the students myself before the topic was brought to me. In consultation with the senior leadership team, we therefore identified a small group of senior students for whom this was a personal issue and with whom I was confident I could have a conversation that would not just be about them as individuals, but also about how we might shape wider policy on gender identity within the school. Staff too were beginning to express the need for guidance about how they should manage students who were asking to use a different name or pronoun, and nobody wanted to get this wrong. We needed a strategy. As so often, I was impressed at once by the thoughtfulness and maturity of this group of seventeen-year-olds and with the help of some legal advice to give clarity, over two or three meetings we drew up a gender identity protocol. The aim was to provide a framework for discussion where an individual expressed a desire to adopt a different gender identity, setting out the responsibilities of the school to respect the welfare and needs of the individual, while managing expectations in terms of what was formally possible: exam entries, for example, would be made in the registered name of the student rather than the adopted name. The key provision, however, was that a student over sixteen who was deemed to have sufficient self-knowledge and maturity and for whom the request could be shown to have some endurance could, after consultation (including with parents, though the students were initially reluctant about this), be recognised as having a different or non-binary gender within the school.

I was aware at the time that we were dealing with a topic of public significance where policy would move quickly as case law developed, and we would need to revisit our protocol before long to keep in step. This was only a starting point. It was also apparent that this issue had the potential to give rise to another beautiful and unique St Paul’s fudge: just as we had a secular foundation while much enjoying singing hymns, so we would be a girls’ school while accommodating some senior students who would never dream of changing school (perish the thought!) but who no longer wanted to be thought of as girls. At the time our protocol was published, we were hailed as having done something revolutionary in bringing gender identity to the surface and allowing gender choice. But it was much simpler than that: we had just enlisted the support of the students to tackle a new issue on which they were well informed and thus, with the contemporary perspective and longer experience combined, created a policy. There is no knowing what my own headmistress would have thought about gender identity, though I remembered how over a much less significant issue some forty years earlier, she had taught me the importance of listening to your students, taking them seriously and giving real value to their opinions. Of course, the possibility of this highly personal and sensitive subject being raised and discussed in a mature way depended on trust and respect. I firmly believe that it was our particular character of openness as a girls’ school that made this potentially difficult conversation possible.

Half a millennium has passed since John Colet founded his school. Now his descendants, the Paulines and Paulinas, are preparing to go out into a world he could not have imagined. But the confidence and love of learning they take with them, their determination to fulfil their potential whatever the challenges, are qualities he would surely have wanted to encourage. His legacy lives on in them. Throughout the school, as I’ve been writing, the autumn term has been unfolding. Six or seven weeks have taken us well into the syllabuses for each academic subject, homework has been rolling in, society meetings have been happening accompanied by quantities of tea and cake, plays and concerts are in rehearsal and the results from hard-fought netball and lacrosse matches are being heralded. Probably there has been the odd behavioural incident and it is already clear which pupil (or parent) files are going to finish up on the bulky side by the end of the year. In a London school, the sense of the seasons is less strong, but it is still there – the evenings drawing in a little and the afternoon air smoky, even if from the remembered bonfires of childhood. Bowling along at full tilt, everyone is glad to reach the two-week October half term. What’s the difference between a two-week half term and a three-week school holiday, for example at Christmas? Answer: one week. And in this way, we have effectively by stealth introduced the four-term year, with the result that having had a proper break, there are fewer coughs and colds in November and December and we can normally get through the Christmas musical events without a mass epidemic of throat infections. I spend one week catching up, and the second away getting some country air with my family in Somerset, where there might even be an apple or two left to pick up.

CHAPTER 3
November
Headship – opening up the path on which the next generation will travel

The second half of the autumn term began for me with the annual residential conference for head teachers. Roller cases packed, determined headmistresses would set off to different parts of the country: I have compared the Bayliss & Harding bathroom products in Buxton and Brighton, Bristol and Birmingham. Imagine 200 headmistresses confined for three days to an air-conditioned hotel – the brisk competence, the curbing of instincts to say ‘shush!’ and take control, the sidelong glances at each other’s outfits. And what was going on in the schools they were supposed to be running? I wished my senior management team an enjoyable few days and caught the train, knowing they would appreciate the freedom – after all, why develop people’s leadership skills if you’re not going to trust them? I just had to promise not to come back with too many bright ideas for them to listen to patiently – a sudden whim to do away with bells, perhaps, or a scheme to buy a field-study centre in north Wales …

As I picture myself on that train journey, slanting November rain spattering the windows, the image of a certain familiar and bespectacled headmistress from the 1970s reappears, smiling quizzically before me. She is the headmistress of Sunny Hill, the romantically and improbably named Desirée Fawcus Cumberlege, my headmistress: Dizzy. Born in India in 1919, a cross between Maggie Smith and Joyce Grenfell, she would tiptoe along the polished parquet corridors of Sunny Hill in fully fashioned stockings and kitten heels, dizzily occupying some higher realm, her academic gown, worn over pastel tweeds, floating out behind her like sails. Her hair was always disciplined into a silvery permanent wave and her winged glasses, sitting at a slight tilt, gave her a faintly surprised look. Like many of her generation she appeared to live entirely for her work: there was no Mr Cumberlege, though we invented for her a tragic past and a dark, dashing officer fiancé, who had (ah! poor Dizzy!) been lost over the Channel in the war. He may even have existed – we embellished him regardless and the lonely life we supposed her to have led since. A distant figure, Dizzy rarely spoke to us except to address her pupils in assembly: ‘Let me make it clear, girls: there are to be no more non-regulation shoes seen, otherwise we will all wear sensible, lace-up “Rosamund”!’ But I do remember one thrilling afternoon when my friend Avril and I were invited to go with her to tea at the house of an elderly former pupil. It was for me an unconscious lesson in leadership that I would remember years later.

The invitation arose because of my bossiness. It was the summer term and we had been asked as pupils to make recommendations for the award of the Radford Award, bestowed annually on a pupil in our form who had shown the most public-spirited attitude during the school year. A benefactor nowadays would know better than to lay themselves open to the risks of litigation inherent in this gesture, but in those days it was genuinely thought that the girls could simply exercise their good judgement and choose appropriately – such simple times we lived in then. When success fell on the most popular girl in our class, admired for her smooth brown hair, permanent golden tan and exotic elephant-hair bracelets bought at home in Kenya, I felt it right to make a democratic stand and insist that, the next year, proper criteria were drawn up to ensure that this was not merely a popularity vote. No doubt I was motivated largely by envy at not being chosen myself, but Miss Cumberlege (she had met girls before who wanted to advise her on how to run the school) brightly suggested we should put this idea to Miss Radford, our benefactor, who duly invited us to tea in her garden.

Accompanied by Avril, a compact, hockey-playing girl with a straight black fringe sitting above an equally straight nose, I waited on the appointed afternoon outside a dark wooden hut we knew to be Miss Cumberlege’s garage. Neither of us had ever seen what was inside the garage, suspecting it to contain agile spiders and perhaps a broken-down lawnmower, but when the headmistress arrived, dressed for the occasion in a silk headscarf and looking very slightly like a primmer Grace Kelly, the doors opened to reveal the back of a very clean, pale blue Ford Anglia. This remarkably slim car with its upturned tail lights reminiscent of its owner’s glasses was clearly Miss Cumberlege’s prized possession, neatly parked in the tiny garage like a model in its matchwood box.

Avril and I waited. Miss Cumberlege squeezed herself behind the wheel and backed expertly out. We climbed in and were soon bowling down the Somerset lanes, the huge cow parsley stems in the summer hedgerows parting as we passed, like the palm trees on Thunderbirds Tracy Island. We felt free as air. I have no recollection now of the outcome of our conversation with Miss Radford, though the old lady seemed delighted at this impromptu tea party with young visitors from her dimly remembered school. Sitting in the wild country garden with its gnarled apple trees, where lazy wasps knocked against our glasses of homemade lemonade, she served us large slices of seed cake, and ever since I have associated the taste of caraway with grandmotherly baking and with being on your best behaviour with older people. For us, the adventure lay in the fact that, contrary to our belief, Miss Cumberlege was actually a real person: she did not cease to exist when outside the school gates. Perhaps when the term ended, she got into the Ford Anglia and went far away from Sunny Hill to a home somewhere, where there was another small garage and a mantelpiece with a silver-framed photograph of a darkly handsome man. Who knew? It was from this afternoon adventure that I understood long afterwards the importance of taking the challenges and opinions of young people seriously, being seen to do so, and giving them time. I was satisfied aged twelve that I had been listened to and my point considered carefully. I don’t remember what happened subsequently about the awarding of the cup – somehow it didn’t seem to matter anymore.

A creature far removed from us in age, dress sense and attitudes, Dizzy was not a figure who had a major impact on our lives at the time; besides, we saw too little of her. How I should love to be able to sit over teacups and ask her about her job, and her life, now that I’ve spent over twenty years treading in her unlikely footsteps. How much of her world and mine would be similar? How much has irrevocably changed?

A little light was shed on this question while I was casting around one Friday afternoon for assembly material. I opened a slim book of essays left on a shelf by my predecessor, called, with studied decorum, The Headmistress Speaks. Originally published in 1937, with contributors as redoubtable as Mary G. Clarke, head of Manchester High School, and Edith Ironside, head of Sunderland High, the words called up for me the spirit and tone of Dizzy herself. But some sounded strangely modern. It was a shock that Ethel Strudwick, for example, appointed High Mistress of St Paul’s in 1927, could write with candour and empathy: ‘School has come to mean something very much warmer, closer and more home-like than it was in earlier days, and the relation between teacher and taught is friendlier, freer and more natural.’[1] I don’t know whether Miss Strudwick embodied this freedom or warmth herself: her portrait hanging in the Great Hall rather suggests not. The aspiration is striking, however, in its informality and recognition of the importance of relationships based not entirely on authority. And Miss Clarke of Manchester, writing about the life of a head, says simply: ‘For the headmistress herself, there is also the personal problem of reconciling the claims of an exacting and unleisured profession, with her own functions and development as a woman.’[2]

Headship still is exacting and unleisured – some might say remorseless. But these two women acknowledge that for all that, the quality of humanity is absolutely central: both in being able to create a sense of community for those within the school, as well as at the same time paying attention to your own identity and growth as a person, so that you bring to the job, and preserve within it, an authentic humanity of your own – expressed in your distinct character and personality. Their words remind me that inside every headmistress – and headmaster – under the sometimes heavy mantle of authority, there is a living person following a unique path of development, separate from, yet inextricably connected to, that professional persona.

There are a thousand ways to think about headship and as many ways of doing it well as there are heads. The wisest know they are not good at everything and gather around themselves colleagues who complement, rather than replicate, their particular skills. It is this human dimension which I have found the most rewarding and the most challenging aspect of the job, and which made the prescient words of Miss Clark and Miss Strudwick resonate with me.

When you join a new school as the head, it’s a bit like boarding a moving train. Nothing stops for you: clambering on, you haul up your suitcase, steady your balance and, moving up through the carriages as best you can, find your way to the driver’s seat. Meanwhile the life of the school and its journey into the future continue and you must learn about them and how you want to steer the train while it hurtles along. You may be the one steering, but you can’t achieve much unless you bring everyone along with you – and that means building effective relationships.

Settling in involves watching and listening. Especially you have to understand the mood and climate of the staff and to find out what they are used to. It takes time to work out the exact shape of the hole your predecessor left. In my first week at St Paul’s, I would wander into the staff common room at morning break – usually a rather pressured fifteen minutes where everyone is jostling to get a quick coffee or catch a colleague before going off to teach their next lesson. One particular morning, as I was spooning instant coffee into a mug emblazoned with the slogan ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’, the head of science came up to me and said, ‘Nice to see you in here. We don’t normally see the high mistress in the staffroom.’ A small point perhaps, but this gave me a hint about the relationship my predecessor had had with her colleagues and therefore what they might be expecting. My style would be more informal – they were sensing that – and while they didn’t altogether mind, they might take time to get used to it. Similarly, when it came to my first heads of department meeting, the director of studies explained that normally those attending the meeting would assemble and then the high mistress would be collected from her office and escorted to join them. Grateful for the heads-up, I suggested a less ceremonial approach, choosing to be in the room first rather than last, so I could catch one or two people before the meeting and help things begin with the idea that we were coming together to think and confer, rather than that I was arriving to preside. So, by gradual steps, I established my own way of doing things and we adapted to one another in a natural and unforced way.

Small details like this accumulate and are the start of making relationships, winning the trust and confidence of the staff. They are a group, so you engage with them both en masse and also as a collection of individuals. Before taking up my post, I took the advice of a wise former head and learned the names of everyone on the staff from a set of photographs. So much more reassuring to be able to address people by name at once and start forging a working alliance from day one, minimising the sense that because you are a newcomer everyone has to start at the beginning for you. Then there is navigating the uncharted waters of the staffroom. There, a unique dynamic prevails, with professional and friendship groupings a new head needs to assimilate and read, listening, observing, absorbing. Here will be laid out the lines of loyalty and tension that may come to the surface at times of crisis or controversy: the more you know and understand of people’s personalities, priorities and preferences, the more you are able to anticipate and manage reactions in the moment. And because the staffroom or common room is where people relax, it’s not just words but also body language that can be revealing: the small group who always sit together lounging on a particular sofa, swiftly dispatching the Times

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