Principal

Before the first bell, the corridors are already busy. Someone is rehearsing a paragraph for assembly, a teacher is writing on a board and rubbing it out again, a group is arguing about a project that is due, and somewhere a lab assistant is setting out apparatus that has to be counted back in at the end of the period. This is the part of school that no brochure photographs, and it is the part I spend my day inside.

A day contains lessons that land and lessons that do not. A child who is quiet for a week and then, on the eighth day, puts their hand up. A class that is restless because the previous period ran long. Most of this work is noticing — the difference between a student who is bored and one who is lost looks identical from the back of the room and nothing alike from close up.

I would rather you heard a problem from us early than discovered it on a report card. The formal conversations happen on report card day; the useful ones happen in the corridor, on the phone, in a car park, in the five minutes after a meeting when nobody is watching. My door is genuinely open, and I would rather a parent came in with something small than waited until it was large.

Rules exist so that a teacher can teach and a child can be safe, and we apply them the same way to everyone — including the children of people we know, which is the only test of a rule that matters.

If you want to know what this school is like, come and sit at the back of a classroom for one period. It will tell you more than any page on this website, including this one.