It doesn’t happen very often, but one of the joys of teaching is when an ex pupil suddenly emerges from the past and you find out about the individual impact you had on them.
It was a few years ago I admit, but my favourite was when I was talking to a trainee English teacher about poetry. She was struggling to find ways of sharing her love of verse with students and I was trying to help out. Then she started talking about her best friend, Beverly. She said that Beverly was really clever and now had a successful career. Apparently, Beverly was the only person she knew who bought poetry books and said that she owed this passionate interest to a keen young English teacher at her school in Sunderland.
And then she let it slip.
“Jonathan, it was you.”
Well, that made me feel very proud and I’ve never forgotten it.
For logistical reasons you have to organise schools into groups: classes, sets, years, houses etc, etc. And one of the challenges for the Consett Academy will be to set up systems to accommodate nearly 2,000 students and ensure that they are all treated as individuals. (And, incidentally, the school where I taught Beverly was, at the time, one of the ten biggest in the country with 2,200 pupils.) And a good school remembers that you’re not dealing with the nameless. Every student has an utterly distinct identity with their own feelings, talents, hopes and dreams which are unique to them. And every single one has a fascinating life history behind and in front of them.
So I like to think that Moorside is pretty good at reaching individuals and bringing out the best in them.
Take our regular case conferences as an example.
Last week’s high point was our year 11 case conference. This is a meeting for all teachers of year 11 and we sit in the big room in The Phoenix Centre and discuss the progress of every year 11 student. So that’ s over 100 young people and it takes ages. If you were a fly on the wall, I guarantee that you’d be impressed by the commitment of the staff to such a time consuming operation. But you’d be even more impressed by the depth of knowledge they have of all individuals and the great care they devote to them.
And it’s not just a talking shop.
The meeting produces a long list of action points for us to follow up with individuals to make sure that their needs are met and they can achieve as highly as possible in their exams.
But we can only guess about the exciting impact that will have on their future life chances.
Let’s hope that, like Beverly, they find a way of telling us what happened because it makes the job worthwhile.
