The Making of Her: Why School Matters. Clarissa Farr
ection id="u5ab60cc0-cd9f-552f-b3e3-085176ade0f2">
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 1 September: Back to school – ‘the make-believe of a beginning’
Chapter 2 October: A question of gender – still vindicating the rights of women?
Chapter 3 November: Headship – opening up the path on which the next generation will travel
Chapter 4 December: Living in community – the love of tradition and the role of co-curricular life
Chapter 5 January: Competition and cooperation – what kind of education do we want for our children?
Chapter 6 February: Be a teacher – be the one you are
Chapter 7 March: Promoting well-being and mental health – a twenty-first-century challenge
Chapter 8 April: When things go wrong – running with risk, facing up to failure, living with loss
Chapter 9 May: Creating the triangle of trust – working with today’s parents
Chapter 10 June: Valediction and looking to the future
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