Crier Profile - Brenda Wilson
This month, Brenda tells us about the events that lead to her becoming headmistress of Swaffham Prior School, and the happy days during which our little primary school was rated top of all of East Anglia.
INFANT TEACHING is the only form of teaching I've done that's kept me awake at 4 o'clock in the morning worrying about the responsibility. I was there for 11 years, in the end.
What I didn't appreciate for a long time was that the teacher who had left had had issues with the Head teacher and had left without notice. The head was the only child of a head teacher, single, a very unhappy woman. For her parents, no man had ever been good enough for their daughter; she appeared very jolly on the surface, but she couldn't bear anybody to go on to better things, and nobody had, not in the 17 years she'd been there. I didn't find out until about five years later when I applied for a deputy head job.
I knew I had a strong application, but I didn't hear anything. I didn't
think anything of it until later when another deputy job came up, and the
school secretary said, 'why don't you go down to the school and
introduce yourself, and let them see what you're like? And I said 'why?
Why should I?'I dragged it, very reluctantly, out of her that when I had
applied for the first job, the other Head teacher had phoned my head and asked
about me, following up my application, and my Head had said 'Well, Mrs
Wilson's a married woman with three children, and you know what married
women are like, don't you?'
And that was it. I was incensed. I'm quite passive about lots of things, but I am very honest and I was shocked that she could be so untruthful. I'd never had a day off in the entire time I'd been there! So I went to the Chief Education Officer and said look, this is not right. It's not true, and she shouldn't have done that. And it must not happen again. And I want my reputation back. Education is quite a closed world. He said okay, I'll see to it. After that I was a little less open with her. Five years later the same job came up again, and she came bounding in to tell me about it: I thought okay, perhaps she's trying to make up for what she's done, and so I applied for it again. And the very next day, I learned that the husband of my colleague from the reception class, who was in the immigration service, was being moved. And it meant uprooting the family - so she was going to apply for another job. My alarm bells started ringing. I thought, she's not going to like us both going, something's going to happen. I didn't hear anything. Neither did the reception teacher; but then while we were outside the head's office, with the secretary, the reception teacher asked her 'have you heard anything? (from the school she'd applied for) and the Head said 'No, I haven't heard a dickybird, you neither, Brenda. I can't wait to tell them how good you are.'The way that it was posed, I could tell something was going on. It turned out that they had caught her out in a lie - she had received a phone call, and implied that Doreen was a ditherer, and found it difficult to make decisions. Then it turned out the head from the school I'd applied to had also phoned; this time she'd said that I was an aggressive and assertive woman. By this time we were all members of the same union, PAT, and I was on the local committee. I was telling our chairman what had happened, and she said Brenda, you've got to do something about this so I went for advice to our union solicitor - lovely man. We arranged a meeting with the Chief Education Officer, the reception teacher, myself and the Head. It was eventually agreed that this was the first stage of grievance procedure. But the head had still not admitted that there had been a second phone call about me. And I felt wronged, my character maligned. I left it with the Chief Education Officer to find out about that call - because, if there had been, it was proof that she had lied. It was an awful time but eventually he phoned and said that there had been a second call. I felt vindicated. He went on to suggest that I might like to take a sideways temporary job at another local school, to ease the situation. I said 'No way, if I leave and she stays, it'll look as if I was in the wrong. I'm not going!'
So I stayed put; the very next job I applied for, I got an interview, and got the job as a deputy. I was there five years. During that time my marriage broke up after 24 years, and once I felt strong enough, I started looking around for another job. One of my friends said, 'Bren, the world's your oyster, you don't have to stay in Kent.'The boys had grown up by then, one of them was married. This was just the encouragement I needed. I saw this job in Cambridge and applied. It was one of those odd things: a couple of summers before, I'd been with a friend to the Mildenhall Air Show and we drove through this area. And between Swaffham Bulbeck and Swaffham Prior, I had the strong, strong feeling that I could live here. I remember it very distinctly : I can still see the cemetery railings in my mind. Eighteen months later I saw the job at Swaffham Prior job, I applied and I got it. Fate!
I came for interview on the Wednesday but I decided to go to the Red Lion for a meal the night before, and I walked through the streets seeing not a soul, thinking it was like an out of season French town! It was very different seeing it the next day. I talked to the children and looked round the school - it had a good feel about it. They obviously asked the staff what they thought, because David said afterwards - "you were the only one that talked to the children!"They took a very long time to decide but I got the job, and I was delighted. The Vicar, Norman Young, asked me back for a cup of tea and I think I went to an exhibition with them in Cambridge - and I think I stayed the night with them too. Norman was a lovely man.
When I started in January 1991 I lodged with the vicar for ten days; then I rented Elspeth Firebrace's flat in Commercial End for about a year. The school had had a period of change - it was very unsettled. I was the fifth head teacher in seven years. There'd been a trouble-shooter head in post for two years prior to my coming, to bring it all together but there were still problems; one class particularly had had a lot of teachers over the years caused by intermittent and long term sick leave. But there was a core of good staff: David Hunns had been appointed as temporary deputy the term before; Sue Jackson had been employed as a SATs co-ordinator, part time, to oversee these new tests. It was obvious that she was a very good teacher and I wanted to keep her. David wasn't appointed as permanent deputy because the head - me - wasn't in post at the time of his appointment but he was very good. I felt we had to formally have a proper interviewing process, so that everyone would know he was the best person for the job. We had a lot of applicants. David showed himself the best. He was great. A bit bolshy, but proud of it - "well, you know where you are with me."We did some changing around over the next few terms: David went into Class 4; Sue into Reception; I worked with Sue - she was part time, so I taught the time she wasn't there - and a new teacher in class two, Chrissie Davies, who was an inspirational teacher.. so really, we changed a lot of the staff, and produced a strong team. It was a happy time. OFSTED inspection in 1995 was excellent our SATs results were 100% which put us in a very good position in the league tables, on paper it looked absolutely fantastic and attracted a lot of publicity. We came out as the top school in East Anglia in the Sunday Times Parents'Guide - we were the only school on their map - but in fact, it shows how statistics can be manipulated because yes, we did come out with 100% but we only put in six or eight children that year! But we did have a good team.
We also tried to get evening classes going - there was a lot of talk but the support was really not very great, but we kept it on for a while - Claire Newbolt gave an art class, and she was brilliant, but the junior size chairs and things were not really suitable for adults. Then.. we kept a fairly stable staff for a few years and it was good - a good time. We had a reputation. The children sent off to Bottisham carried that reputation, and the school expanded and numbers grew.