Dear Parents and Carers

This is my very last newsletter and I want to thank you for all your kind words and support over the years. I would also like to thank you as a proxy for the many thousands of parents/carers I have had the privilege to work with and serve over the years.

I started teaching full time in January 1981, a maternity cover in my teaching practice school in Herefordshire. After 3 years I decided that I needed to work in a challenging inner city environment and moved to Leicester where I stayed for the next 18 years. Like many teachers, I did not have, and still do not have any career ‘plan’. The last thing that a young teacher should want to be is a senior leader. They should enjoy the company of young people, teach a demanding and exciting timetable, go on trips, play sport and be the best form tutor in the world. They should view the decisions of senior staff with a healthy scepticism and collaborate with valued colleagues to constantly improve. By comparison, being a senior leader, while very scary at times, is really quite dull. The real adventure is elsewhere in schools, and that is how it should be.

I have been a head teacher for 15 years and have led 4 schools (once as an interim head like Andy Perry). The things I learned were profound and sometimes painful:

• Ultimately schools are run on good will: the good will of parents/carers, students and staff.
• Government regulation and legislation is to be endured and worked round rather than slavishly adhered to. Change is ever with us and some good and new ideas are on their way, but so many ideas from government follow the old adage that ‘new ideas are not good and good ideas are not new’!
• Schools need to adapt and be flexible.
• Schools need to be kind to people and understanding and supportive when issues arise.
• Schools must be honest and have integrity. They must have the interests of all students at their heart; working with their communities and families to produce young people with enduring positive values who are going to make a positive difference.
• If you trust people they seldom, if ever, let you down.
• ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’ a Zulu proverb, meaning a person is only a person through their relationship with others. The Zulu word ‘umbuntu’ means the essence of being human. It says ‘my humanity is inextricably bound up with yours’. It is about belonging, being a whole person and having compassion for others. It is the sort of person you want to work with and the sort of person you want to be.

It just remains for me to thank you again. I will miss school, but I now want to move on to the next part of my life and who knows what adventures lie ahead.

All the very best for the future.

Paul MacIntyre

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