The Making of Her: Why School Matters
What is school for and why does it matter? The Making of Her asks the big questions. What are the challenges facing students and their teachers today? How do we educate girls to become tomorrow’s leaders? What is the role of a school in a modern, virtual world? This book takes a provocative look at our education system, laying bare the day-to-day experience of school for students, teachers and families. Now, in the twenty-first century, what does it take for every student, regardless of background, to find their passion, reach towards excellence and flourish? Clarissa Farr pulls together everything she has learned during her extraordinary leadership career into a message for our time. If we care about the future for our schools and young people, here are the changes we must make.
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THE MAKING OF HER
Why School Matters
Clarissa Farr
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
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
Remembering my parents, Alan and Wendy Farr
Contents
Chapter 1September: Back to school – ‘the make-believe of a beginning’
Chapter 2October: A question of gender – still vindicating the rights of women?
Chapter 3November: Headship – opening up the path on which the next generation will travel
Chapter 4December: Living in community – the love of tradition and the role of co-curricular life
Chapter 5January: Competition and cooperation – what kind of education do we want for our children?
Chapter 6February: Be a teacher – be the one you are
Chapter 7March: Promoting well-being and mental health – a twenty-first-century challenge
Chapter 8April: When things go wrong – running with risk, facing up to failure, living with loss
Chapter 9May: Creating the triangle of trust – working with today’s parents
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
