Shaun Fenton OBE, Headmaster of Reigate Grammar, on why children should be well-educated, not just well-qualified
“Children won’t care what you know until they know that you care. Establish that relationship, that trust, and then be the teacher that the children in your classroom will remember fondly in 20 or 30 years’ time as the person who believed in them.”
Shaun Fenton OBE is headmaster of Reigate Grammar School, Surrey's leading co-educational independent day school, which he has led since 2012 as it has grown into a family of schools across the UK and beyond. The first in his family to go to university, he read PPE at Keble College Oxford and began his career in accountancy before a visit to his old school, and a conversation with the teacher who had mentored him, convinced him that working with children was the real privilege. He went on to lead schools across very different contexts, from a comprehensive in Hertfordshire to a state grammar in Cheltenham, before arriving at Reigate, and has served as chair of HMC along the way. In this conversation, Shaun reflects on the difference between the state and independent sectors, why he refuses to see happiness and achievement as a trade-off, and how character is really formed in the moments that never appear on an exam paper.
🎙️ Episode highlights
He explains why he believes children should be well-educated, not just well-qualified, and why the current exam system only measures what a child can do alone in a room at a single moment in time.
He reflects on leading across the state and independent sectors, and why he felt he was working with "two hands tied behind his back" under the weight of Ofsted, league tables and stretched resources.
He pushes back on the fashionable habit of catastrophising young people, pointing out that every generation from the 1960s to Socrates has been accused of the same decline.
He describes where character is really formed: the moment you step from the wings into the light on a first night, or the nerves before a first debate, and how those memories are called on decades later.
His controversial opinion: the whole idea of teacher retention is upside down, and we should welcome people into teaching as part of a portfolio career rather than trying to box them into 40 years.
Reflecting on his upbringing as the son of Alvin Stardust, Shaun explains why teaching is a performance art, and how he is doing his own version of what his family always did: inspiring people and getting them interested in the message.