In the last week of term I was invited to take a group of students to present to a Conference at Ohakea Airbase entitled “Realising women’s potential.” The focus of the conference was on identifying and enhancing the factors that contribute to the recruitment and retention of women in the armed forces. They invited our students to talk about how our Girls’ High School has helped them to begin to realise their own potential. I took 5 talented students who spoke about the frankly quite amazing things they have already achieved before they are even eligible to vote – Sally has just spent a year on our Board of Trustees, Jaimee is a world champion at under 19 aquathlon (swimming and running to you and I – in case you are wondering she has represented NZ at triathlon too), Rebecca is a World Vision Ambassador and will travel to Bangladesh later this year, Hema has just achieved her Gold Duke of Edinburgh and Minushika has just returned from the London International Youth Science Forum. They talked about working on their CVs, their aspirations for doctorates and their responsibilities as global citizens . . . I sat in awe! At their age I am not sure I even knew what a CV was; I had never set foot outside of my own country and I was only just gathering the nerve to consider applying to university. Surprisingly, the assembled dignitaries wanted to hear from
me too – no pressure then! – at almost 3 times their age I haven’t yet achieved my first gold medal; my doctorate awaits a sponsor with a bottomless bank account and Angelina Jolie just won’t give up and make way for me to be a UN Special Envoy. So, I shared some of my experiences as Principal of the British School in Manila, Philippines – I talked about striving for equitable access to education and the legacy we leave as we move through the world. Whilst my Mum tells anyone who is unfortunate enough to sit next to her on the bus that her daughter has an MBE from the Queen – 10 years after leaving Manila it is the continued progress of the educational equity projects we set up that is my proudest legacy. I still talk about the sister school relationship we built with the high school down the road, where the 7000 students were split into a morning shift and an afternoon shift, where the teacher pupil ratio was 1:65 and the basketball court to pupil ratio was 1:7000. Our students raised funds and bought a school bus so they could send teams to competitions and we began a programme where 5 students a year were given scholarships to attend our school – a drop in the ocean perhaps – but an opportunity that changes lives. As we were leaving a servicewoman came up to me and congratulated me on spending 7 years in the Philippines as, in
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the forces, it is considered to be a tough posting. I told her the toughest part for me had been deciding to leave. I meant it. My son Jude (who is about to start High School!) was born in Manila. I would have loved him to attend international school there, we had pupil teacher ratios of 1:20 on average (of course I believe it makes a difference) and a really vibrant multicultural atmosphere where diversity really was celebrated. So why didn’t we stay? When Jude had just started walking we took him to the Botanical Gardens in Manila. The gardens have an amazing set of wrought iron gates that Jude toddled off towards. On the other side of the gates was a class of Filipino children on a school trip. As my curly haired boy ran smiling up to them they reached their hands out through the gate to touch him and just as they did I took a photograph. Looking at the picture back at home I was strikingly reminded of a zoo, with him as the prize exhibit and my fears, that even if he learned to speak Tagalog he would always be a ‘foreigner’ and grow up without a place where he truly belonged, were magnified. So we began to look for somewhere we could settle where immigrants were welcomed and he could grow up feeling a sense of identity and belonging. Ten years later looking back at our decision to leave the Philippines and emigrate to NZ – were my fears justified? I have no idea – but I do know that cultural identity matters. I am proud that Jude calls himself a New Zealander yet chooses to tell people he was born in Manila; actively seeks out friends from other cultures; hates racism towards Asians and wants to become a NZ citizen and join the Air force or design planes. Having spent much of my professional life in schools with a
wide range of cultures, the need to build a positive, inclusive school culture is always a goal. I am proud that the girls I took to Ohakea represented a range of cultures within our school. Over the last few days I have been reviewing the results of our wellbeing surveys. Much to my relief our girls overwhelmingly report that they feel safe at our school and that we do not have an aggressive school culture. They also report that students get on well with students from other cultures and a majority of them report that teachers and students care about one another. One of the few statements that received an overwhelmingly negative response was ‘teachers are interested in my culture or family background.’ Does this matter? I think it does. As we move into next school year I will be breaking this data down further and asking teachers to reflect on this honestly. If they consider that they are interested in students’ culture and background how can they communicate this in their day-to-day teaching?
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