Ahead of the Class: how an aspiring headmistress gave children back their future
Marie Stubbs John Murray, 260pp, £16.99
ISBN 0719563356
When Marie Stubbs retired, she packed up her sensible, workaday suits, dyed her hair blonde, and started swimming regularly. The wife of Sir William Stubbs - who, as chairman of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, was the fall guy for last summer's A-level crisis - she looked forward to a tranquil retirement. For the previous 13 years she had been a successful secondary head in the "sunny suburbs".
Then, on holiday, she received a message. Could she call the director of education for the Catholic Diocese of Westminster? What he wanted "stunned" Stubbs. Would she abandon her retirement and take over St George's Roman Catholic Secondary School in Maida Vale - the school made famous five years previously by the murder of its then head, Philip Lawrence?
Since his death, the school had plunged into decline.Those pupils who bothered to attend treated the place like a youth club; the premises were ugly and unloved; many teachers were demoralised to the point of apathy. Only a determined and optimistic soul would have believed that St George's could be rescued.
A firm believer that those who are not for her are against her, Stubbs recruited two of her former deputy heads and the trio swept into St George's. They had a year to "save" the school. Her target was to get St George's off "special measures" and return it to a state where learning was possible. To this end, she rose at 5.30 each morning, and often stayed at work until 10pm or 11pm at night. Gradually, the tide turned. The recalcitrant teachers sloped off, and attendance rose. Extra-curricular activities such as lunchtime clubs, school plays and celebrity visits were introduced.
An excellent networker, Stubbs persuaded the nearby Harrow public school to lend St George's the use of its playing fields. She fought such evils as baseball caps and chewing gum - on one occasion one of her deputies wore a cap while she chewed gum in front of parents to ram home the message. All the while, she kept up her spirits by paying a great deal of attention to her appearance: after school she would slip away to a nearby Iranian-run beauty parlour.
Her tone is cosy and self-regarding (the book could have been subtitled "the diary of a somebody") and at times it sags into a prize-day roll-call of all those who stood with her. A writer with as poor an ear for dialogue as Stubbs would do well to avoid the vernacular: having electricians say "yer" rather than "your" merely sounds patronising. But although the outcome is never seriously in doubt, the story she tells is a good one.
No regiment ever prepared for a general's inspection with as much thoroughness as Stubbs and her team did for the final Ofsted visit. It is almost impossible not to cheer silently when the inspector announces: "I am of the opinion that the school no longer requires special measures since it is now providing an acceptable standard of education for its pupils."
St George's had been transformed into a good environment for children previously regarded as little more than educational cannon fodder. Remarkably, the term after Stubbs completed her stint, the school was oversubscribed.
It is hard in these circumstances to begrudge the feisty "headmistress" (as she liked to be called) her self-congratulation and vanities. She had earned her postponed retirement - blonded hair and all.
Robert Chesshyre writes for the Daily Telegraph magazine
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