So there it was. 2007. A decision to stop! To make a life change. After 20 years in charge of schools and many more as part of school senior teams, enough was enough.

Everyone said “You won’t be able to stop…” I thought I knew differently. I was wrong.

So I thought I might write up the story. A book might be a bit presumptuous so perhaps a personal record and reflection might be better.  Something that captured my learning, my mistakes so that others might also enjoy the fun and the challenges, the achievement and disappointments. I wanted it to be more than just a personal summary but more a reflection of how we run education and  the inherent values and principles we should live.

Ironically, I have been so busy since the decision to stop, this monologue has only moved to be jottings in a moleskin book. So this is a way of making it happen. 

I trust it won’t be too self-indulgent, but it has been and still is a rich and varied working life. I have been privileged to work with and meet some amazing people, be supported by an incredible family and be surprised every day by brilliant young people. So firstly thanks to all of you.

From the Beach

So starting towards the end, the promise was, that once I finished, we would have a great holiday somewhere in Africa. So it’s November 2008. I sit in paradise, albeit the manufactured paradise of the Breezes Beach Club on Zanzibar. Inevitably I am by the pool under some palms. Every part of this day will be managed, every part of my body will be pampered!

This represents what we had planned 18 months earlier – a chance to reflect and detox. Instead I seem to have accumulated two further schools to manage, this time in Sweden. More of that much later.

It is over 15 years since I was last in Zanzibar. I was there with a school exchange programme supported by BP. We’d spent two and a half weeks in the heart of Tanzania in Dodoma, but spent the last few days back at a beach resort north of Dar es Salaam. It had proved to be a fantastic but heart-rending experience. All those years of geography teaching had not prepared me for the poverty of Tanzania or the humility of its people.

It would be easy to focus on the poverty but that seems to devalue and undersell this society. Of course the poverty was grinding and is a matter of life and death but despite that, we met so many generous people. Not generous in the sense of gifts or extravagance, but in their time, their shared affection and interest. It was summed up for me by Saleem, the Head Boy, who on leaving handed me a roughly carved figure  to remember him by. He added,

“Apologies for the gift, but I am poor in this world, but rich in heart. Pleas take this as part of me to your home and family” So began my relationship with Africa.

This later trip is just a holiday, an indulgence. It is far removed from this earlier visit both in terms of itinerary and motive. It represents that dilemma of the Englishman abroad; I am providing valuable currency and income, but how much reaches the everyday Tanzanian? As you drive towards the East Coast from the airport, through the markets around Stone Town, though the mass of humanity using every ounce of their innovation and creativity to provide an income and a future, through the half-built homes that represent the hopes and ambitions of every family, you soon realise the artificiality of your paradise resort.

This was so graphically illustrated on my first visit to the Bahari Beach all those years earlier. Here our resort idyll was protected more overtly by barbed wire and guards. It was planned  more as a protection from the hassle of the gift sellers and hawkers than any great personal risk. But there I sat, reading on a white sand beach by an azure sea ignoring the reality of where I was.

Except I was reading  a “Letter from Daniel” by Fergal Keane, the BBC African reporter at the time. Part of the book was a report from the genocide-wracked  Rwanda, where he descibes the view from a bridge on the Tanzanian border. Here some of the worst excesses of the brutality were evident  as the river carried the mutilated bodies into Lake Victoria. A reality check, but a chance to personally reflect on why I was here and what I was doing. It challenged me to take a much more positive response to my enjoyment and involvement in Africa. Small and inadequate though that might be, but it would be based on principles as well as a delight on what Africa offers.

‘A deep moral purpose’ has to be what school leadership is about. What else can be more important than to establish an environment that not only encourages learning in the traditional sense, but also provides a secure and safe place for children to test and develop their own value systems. It is so hard to do given some of the simple messages they receive from the television and press.

I started my teaching career in the centre of Leeds in a large Victorian building surrounded by shopping streets and malls. It was a challenging place to begin your careeer but provided a touchstone to measure future problems and problems against.

Many times as I worked with colleagues in more suburban and rural environments  I was able to remind myself of the real magitude of their problens as against those of  an inner city multi-cultural school in the seventies. It should be a part of every teachers professional development to have a reality check working on schools serving more challenged communities.

Similarly, I believe that taking young people and teachers elsewhere in the world is not just about enrichment but a chance to recognise the global society in which we live and work; to recognise the what we have here in the UK, but also to ask why  it has to be that way. To get a sense of perspective.

Imagine a school two hours from Dodoma along a pock-marked red dust road shared with Masai cattle herders,  and fuel trucks struggling overland to Rwanda. As we arrive red with the dust, and shaken to a jolt, our spirits are lifted as the whole school in pristine white shirts and khaki shorts and skirts stand in ordered ranks and sing at top voice as we arrive. The school has half a roof, as the rest blew off last year. The classrooms have earthen floors with 60 students are  shining  amongst a clutter of furniture carefully guarding their preciious paper and pencils. Learning for them is clearly their one chance to escape poverty and achieve for themselves and their families.

Now take your self back to the UK and our own school challenges and problems. See the sense of perspective. Whether it is a visit or some virtual contact, giving young people and above all teachers that experience, grounds them. After a later visit to South Africa and a visit to the township schools I asked Andy, a young Maths teacher what he had gained from the visit.

” It has reminded me why I came into teaching”

How sad that someone who had been in teaching for less than 5 years had forgotten that core purpose, but what an outcome for him and his learners.

So it is not about foreign trips or experiences. It is part of achieving a realistic sense of moral purpose in our work and from time to time a sense of inspiration. It doesn’t have to be Africa. It doesn’t even have to be a visit in this digital age. But it thas to be a relationship. And I cannot think of a single link- up I have not set up that has not had a real impact on those young people and teachers.

So on to Part Two and a journey to the Serengeti.

(photo by Thomas Churchill)