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.
Headship – opening up the path on which the next generation will travel
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
