The Making of Her: Why School Matters

‘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 (#ulink_93f518c6-1a27-573f-9355-36f17257e2eb)

November (#ulink_93f518c6-1a27-573f-9355-36f17257e2eb)

Headship – opening up the path on which the next generation will travel (#ulink_93f518c6-1a27-573f-9355-36f17257e2eb)

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] (#litres_trial_promo) 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] (#litres_trial_promo)

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