we took charge of their education and care. The letters gave parents at the outset an unhurried and respected voice as well as underlining the importance we attached to their special, uniquely experienced perspective. Of course, they also gave insight into the dynamics of families and their values and what circumstances we might be engaging with as time went on: families separated across the world because of work commitments perhaps, families where there was only one parent or sometimes families caring for a sibling with disability or an elderly grandparent. Reading these letters, filled with unashamedly partisan love and with hopes and aspirations for a daughter’s future, I hoped the parents would keep copies, to read again to their daughter as she left school in seven years’ time. ‘Tell me about your daughter’ was perhaps the most powerful conversation opener I ever employed, and it was where each individual girl’s story at senior school would begin.
Having invited them to write those important letters, during our welcome tea party I would explain to the crowd of slightly apprehensive new parents that we would be encouraging the girls’ independence right from the start. So soon? their faces said. My own mother’s maxim was that as a good parent you should make your child independent of you ‘as early as possible’ and this very practical and sound advice, especially for working mothers, I have always kept in mind. As parents, they would not be told every little thing, because this was a stage where the pupils would be encouraged to take responsibility for themselves and sort out some of their own challenges. There are many things for the girls to adjust to on starting life in a new, bigger school, with more pupils and teachers, more subjects to get used to and a totally new way of doing things, I would tell them. But we would all be there to help. For example, if as a pupil you are too busy attending lots of exciting after-school clubs to get your homework done (a very familiar problem to many an eager new eleven-year-old) this is a thing to talk to your tutor about. You don’t need to rush to involve your mother or father. At this I would see the parents looking hesitant: surely it was up to them to know everything, to smooth away all the snowdrifts blocking their path? No, I would say firmly. Education is about learning to solve problems for yourself, even though that adjustment and releasing of parental control is very hard.
For us parents, this learning to let go is a lifelong counter-intuitive lesson (I’m still working on it and my children are in their early twenties) and we are greatly helped in the adjustment if, at the secondary stage, the school makes the effort to forge an effective and trusting relationship with us. As a head I was always aware that mutual trust could only be built up over time, but the school needed to make clear that this was a priority. Reminding parents that as a parent myself I was not unaware of the adjustment they were having to make, at that same welcome tea party I would talk about the exciting journey we were embarking on together, entering into partnership in the care and education of their children, and how important it was that we established good channels of communication – and then kept them open. During your daughter’s time with us there will be ups and downs, I warned lightly. The teenage years are coming! If you are having difficulty adjusting to that bored sigh when you ask what your daughter did at school, wait until you are getting the adolescent eye roll accompanied by ‘Hello …?’ when you make some well-intentioned but hopelessly inept remark about modern social mores or popular culture.
School and home need to work together – or at least in trusting partnership. With long experience of teenagers, we have dealt with most things: absenteeism, amnesia about homework deadlines, absconding, arson … one could go on through the alphabet but you get my point. We try always to operate from the principle that the school is a place to learn about boundaries but wherever possible to have the chance to start again and do better. But of course we know that having heard your daughter’s own account of events, you may not necessarily always see things as we do. If as parents you are unhappy about the way we handle something, try not to talk about the school critically in front of your daughter at home, but come and talk to me or your daughter’s tutor. Children are naturally loyal – both to their school, and to their parents. The girl who has heard her parents running the school down at home cannot then look her headmistress in the eye: an invisible line has been crossed; something is wrong in her world. I have seen this on a few occasions and it always saddens me to see the girl removed from that happy circle of security and unsure of the way back. We need to build up, to see her through good times and bad, that precious, triangular relationship of trust and respect between pupil, parents and school. This is incredibly important to the security and stability of your daughter. Once it has been damaged, it can be very difficult to repair. If you promise not to criticise us at home, I would end with a wry smile, I promise I will not say to your daughter: ‘I hear your mother has been complaining again, Anya!’ If the parents felt they had had a talk from the headmistress, well, they had. Better that than have communication breakdown later when, inevitably, it would be the girl who suffered.
So how to be a good ‘new’ parent? Remember that whatever school meant to you, your child is writing her own story. Get used to the fact that you will not know everything: be sure to forge a good relationship with your child’s most important adult at school – probably the tutor – which means not expecting daily personal bulletins on progress, but a relationship of trust where you would feel comfortable to be in touch if you had a genuine concern or worry. Respect the fact that your child will choose her own friends, develop her own opinions and explore her own interests: this is her education after all … Encourage and enjoy her growing independence, for just as she develops her separate life from you, just as surely she will want, in her own time, to share parts of it too.
In thinking about ourselves as former pupils and now as parents, projecting our own memories of school onto the fresh experience of our children, we have always to keep in mind that the world today is very different from the world in which we grew up ourselves. It sounds so obvious. The generation growing up in schools today – sometimes called Generation Z or the post-millennial generation – have for one thing never known a world without the internet, the iPhone and the iPad. Using technology comes naturally to them and they are used to the freedoms it brings: the ability to find out information instantly, the ability to connect with others unlimited by time and space and the ability to create virtual identities which appear to be untrammelled by the responsibilities of normal life. In cities especially, children tend to be both less connected to their immediate communities and less interested in national politics while at the same time being better informed about the macro, global problems of inequality, poverty and climate change. Following the financial crisis of 2008 and the revaluation of financial power, together with the loss of respect for certain industries such as banking, there is now a more general questioning of the authority of institutions. This generation does not find virtue in patience; with the answer to anything a screen touch away, students value speed over accuracy. However, while they may be able to source information very fast, they are less equipped to discriminate as to whether sources are trustworthy. When you take a book out of the school library, you pretty much know it is worth reading or it wouldn’t be there. Look up something online and you don’t necessarily have that assurance. The prevalence of mental ill health in young people points amongst other things to the darker side of the fast-moving and technological world they inhabit, and the sense of being alone which prevails within the virtual world of cyber connectivity. All that said, Generation Z are fired with a great sense of social responsibility: they grasp the fact that if the species is to survive, they will need to turn a competitive world in which wealth is more and more unequally distributed into a collaborative one where shrinking natural resources are shared. Many opt to volunteer their time in projects which have social benefits either at home or abroad (almost every girl in the top year was doing this by the time I left St Paul’s) and they look forward to careers which will be more varied and less linear than those their parents have experienced. (I will return to specific aspects of this wider context and the Generation Z mindset in later chapters.) The point to emphasise here is that the prevailing characteristic which they and therefore schools need to grapple with is a climate of much greater uncertainty and unpredictability. This provides challenge and opportunity and we have to prepare them for both. To lead fulfilled lives and contribute to society they will need more than their natural optimism and enviably short memory for things that went wrong. They will need creativity and imagination, the ability to work with others and to apply
