Life at my school is founded on the Gospel values which, I found after a spot of googling, involve the sort of thing even the most devout atheist should be able to sign up to: forgiveness, honesty, trust, family and, above all, love.
I listened with disbelief in the first staff meeting when we were told it was our job to love all our students — especially the ones who were hardest to love. This was a departure from the successful academy school in east London where I trained, when staff would gather together in the name of no excuses, exam results and value-added scores.
This emphasis on love seems to me oddly profound, because from it everything else flows. If you force yourself to care deeply for every one of your students, you work harder for them, you want the best for them. All the other stuff I learnt in teacher training after leaving my job as a columnist at the Financial Times — differentiation and assessment for learning — seems a bit by the by.
It is not only the Gospel that is making me have a rethink. It is the experience of teaching and living 300 miles from the capital, my home for the past 63 years.
The stats bear this out. According to the University of Essex’s Understanding Society study, the North East is the least mobile place in the country, with 55 per cent of survey respondents living within 15 miles of their mother — more than three times as many as in the capital. And, if my students are any guide, this statistic is not about to change, as few of them plan to leave. They might go abroad for a bit (I tried to warn them that Brexit has made this harder), but after that they want to return home. No one has any interest in moving to London. They know they can’t afford it, and don’t fancy it anyway.