Heads & Tales - Clarissa Farr
We are delighted to be joined on Heads & Tales by Clarissa Farr, in her own words, a lifelong educator, and in our words a giant of the education world.
Clarissa started her teaching career at a non-selective city comprehensive, and then after her first headship at Queenswood, a girls school in Hertfordshire, spent 11 years as High Mistress of St Paul’s Girls School, the UK’s most academically successful girls school.
Clarissa’s first book, The Making of Her: Why School Matters, published in 2019 is a personal view of education and leadership today.
What drew you to education?
I had one English teacher who ignited my love for that subject. I loved the subject; I thought I was certain to interest my students in the novels I loved. When I started working with young people, I found their mindset totally fascinating.
Did you have a mentor?
I have a mentor called Gillian Stamp. She has opened my eyes to new ways of thinking about leadership. You don’t have a mentor because you have a problem, you have one because everyone needs it, someone who can provoke a different perspective that helps you solve problems.
What was teaching like when you first started?
At the time, it was pretty brutal. It was a fairly difficult and really challenging experience and what I learnt really served me in my teaching career. Timing was key: for example, how to motivate people on a Friday afternoon or wait long enough for the noise to subside so you could continue teaching.
You have to work out where they are as students and go to them rather than expect them to come to you.
What is your style of leadership?
When I became a Head, I was by far the youngest person in the leadership team, so I had to be authentic and open to things I didn't know anything about. I had to listen a lot. From the beginning, you must be a fountain of optimism, even when things go wrong all the time. It’s not about being unrealistic but that positivity is at the core.
Tell us about a mistake you made?
I made the catastrophic mistake of wanting to change the logo of the school. With a broadly democratic process, I then used an old Paulina to make a new logo. When it was produced, everyone hated it! They were absolutely enraged. I realised that tradition went right to the core, and we had to perform a slight U-turn. I learnt a huge amount from that experience.
How does architecture inform a child’s experience at school?
There's a lot of evidence linking performance, well-being and environment. When I was working in Hong Kong, it was just a new school rising out of the ground. There was a lot of natural light and it impacted the emotional climate of the school and made students and teachers feel better.
I was part of major building projects at both my schools, and I learnt a lot about how design could impact the experience of learning there. I took inspiration from Reggio Emilia and their focus on the early years of education; they put real emphasis on creating a great environment to learn in.
If we don’t take advantage of nature and creative design in designing schools, we’re really shortchanging young people.
What were some of the key challenges you may have dealt with, like teacher retention or pupil voice?
We wanted to create an engaging and meaningful community. Creating the teacher community is crucial, across ages and genders. Everyone should feel like they’ve got a stake in the direction of the school. Bringing both administrative and teaching staff together, it really takes time.
The girls at SPGS certainly had a voice but it was about how to harness that. They needed to feel like they could have a stake in the school they were learning at. For example, we created a gender identity protocol for pupils who didn’t identify as girls and worked with lawyers to create a policy that worked for everyone.
More broadly, we have, and had, a responsibility to teach students how to engage with issues that lead to productive outcomes.
How do you manage parents?
When parents become angry or demanding, it’s usually because they feel vulnerable in some way. It was always important to let everything close and listen, but at the root of it might be fear about their children. You have to hear it all, but parents themselves need to understand the school is built to work for all children, not just theirs.
How would you comment on the 21st century workplace?
At SPGS we always said, that there was nothing you couldn’t do if you were a girl. It was quite common for girls to come back and comment on imbalances in power in workplaces. Girls' schools should exist and function ahead of, not behind, the times. They’re aspirational and motivating places.
What next for you?
I’d love to write another book. I’m very interested in life transitions, leaping from the certain and the known into new territories. In chess it’s like a knight’s move, moving to the side and also forward.