INTERNATIONAL PARTNERSHIPS


When head Alistair Macnaughton welcomed Indian


educator Joshua Jayakumar into his home, he had no idea how his life was about to change, and the tragedy that would follow


T


HESE DAYSwe all have plenty to say about “global citizenship” and plenty to do as we weave it into the warp and weft of the curriculum. Ten years ago we might have been doubtful at first, perhaps understandably cynical about yet another government initiative, but


we have indeed reached out, tremulously to begin with, and found other hands to grasp, whether nearby, in countries like France and Germany, or in some truly exotic places, right across the other side of the world. When we discovered that language did not, after all,


have to be the barrier we thought it was, what was there to stop us? Gap year and work experience placements, teacher exchanges, classes thousands of miles apart joined in penpal schemes, video-conferencing on global problems like poverty and overpopulation – why, we sometimes wonder, has it taken us so long? There is a world out there and even doors previously closed, in Russia and China, are opening at last. At my school, The King’s School in Gloucester, we


have a programme of international partnerships of which we are intensely proud. The programme includes annual contact with a school in Manhattan, two schools in Canberra and Sydney and a growing network of schools in Japan, one of which recently visited us, en masse, for two days of cultural exchange. Above all, however, is a much cherished link with the English Speaking School in Dornakal, South India – a small Anglican establishment in a very poor, rural area, about as different from our school as it might be possible to imagine.


Independent thinking Instant communication


WE LIVE in an era of instant communication and demand for instant response. Waiting for something, taking time to reflect, letting something develop – these are in many ways becoming lost habits. A love letter written by the poet Keats has recently


been sold for £96,000. How often do any of us receive a proper letter in the post these days? Yes, we receive mountains of junk mail and advertising bumpf, but a good old-fashioned letter from a friend – a rare thing. Mobile technology has some benefits, but it can also become all-consuming. I am sure we have all encountered


pupils whose parents are in despair after discovering that they have sent and received over 100 texts during a night, or spent hours on some form of messaging service or Facebook or another such site. It becomes obsessive and the pressure


seems to be that young people cannot switch off “in case they miss something” or “somebody says something about them”. It is all too easy to dash off a text, email


or instant message without thinking or reading through it and then causing untold hurt and damage. Once sent, the words are out there for all to read or recover at a later date. Another aspect of this instant


culture is that parents expect teachers to respond immediately to all messages and to give them information at once. Staff email boxes can fill up with messages between one lesson and the next and many of these messages come with the tag “sent from my iPhone”. A parent may be sitting on a train or waiting


for a bus or a meeting and they think about their child and fire off an email to the school, demanding a progress update or complaining about what a teacher has allegedly said or done. The good old-fashioned request for permission


for absence is being replaced by an email stating that they are on their way to collect Kylie to take her to the dentist or some such and meanwhile Kylie has received a message on her mobile from her mother telling her to be ready at the school gate.


The idea that we are not all sitting at our computers


or with an iPhone at the ready in order to give an instant response seems to come as a surprise to many. When teachers are teaching a class, or “facilitating


a learning experience”, to use the alternative jargon, I would not want them to be constantly checking for and responding to messages from parents. I imagine that the parents of the children in the class would prefer the teachers to be focused on their children, too, rather than answering requests from other parents. I realise that the DCSF, as was, declared that we must have every day real- time reporting on pupils, but I have never quite understood how one was supposed to teach a class while also simultaneously creating reports on all of the 30 pupils to update their parents on


their progress. Nurseries have solved the problem


by installing webcams, so that parents can observe their offspring while they are receiving childcare. So perhaps we should install webcams in every area of the school, but then Jamie’s Dream School has shown us quite enough footage of challenging pupils and unsuccessful “lessons” to last a


lifetime. Perhaps the answer is to install aerials on to the heads of all children, with webcams attached which only show


what they are doing – their parents could then monitor whether they are on task and


exactly what they are doing all day. It might cause a problem in sports and some might object to having metal attached to them – but


given the battles many schools face over earrings, piercings and other unsuitable accoutrements and the willingness of most young people to be permanently attached to an electronic device, I am not sure it would be a real issue. Have a happy holiday!


• Marion Gibbs is headmistress of the independent James Allen’s Girls’ School in London.


Sadly missed: During his short visit to the UK, Indian educator Joshua Jayakumar’s passion and friendship touched the lives of many people within The King’s School community


SecEd • April 7 2011 7 In the last three years, we have raised funds to


improve the basic amenities there, with better toilets and a proper water supply. We have helped, too, in building the school an ICT infrastructure, enabling us to communicate with them daily when before we had to rely on a single telephone, in the home of their diocesan bishop. No exchange, however, will work without a


meaningful programme of reciprocal visits, something our brilliant co-ordinator of international affairs reminded me of last year as she attempted to arrange the first visit to King’s from Dornakal and persuaded me that since the Indian school’s principal, Joshua Jayakumar, would be leading the small group of teachers and pupils, the least I could do would be to have him stay in my home for part of the time. I am sorry to say that my first reaction to this did not reflect well on me, going from the thought: “You


Indian visitor


cannot be serious!” to “He’s staying for 10 days!” And finally saying to myself: “And just what will my wife say when I tell her the news?” However, I soon saw that Indian hospitality should


be repaid, even if it did mean that the family would have to cook and eat some decent meals for a change and keep the house 1,000 per cent tidier... And so, a few weeks later, the the doorbell rang and


there, standing in the November rain, shivering slightly but smiling hugely, a battered suitcase in his hand, was Joshua Jayakumar. Many cups of tea later – not to mention the best


chocolate biscuits to be bought in Gloucester – it seemed as if we had known him all our lives such was his natural warmth and endearing enthusiasm. At that first meeting we were all struck by his winning simplicity. Here was someone without any pretence of sophistication or deep-lying “issues”. He was a man of god, uncomplicated in his faith, excited more than anything else to be visiting the land that had produced the 19th century missionaries who did so much to bring Christianity to rural India, figures he could describe in incredible detail, almost as if he had known them personally. When introducing Joshua to my three children,


something I had been a little apprehensive about, he was simply himself and, as for them, I had never seen them so attentive to a guest. Never mind the miracle of feeding the five thousand or raising Lazarus from the dead – here was a man who could transform three truculent adolescents back into children again, their very best selves that I sometimes thought might have departed forever. Mind you, we did not – I should add – feel quite so warmly disposed when the house was woken at 5am by the sound of Joshua loudly singing his favourite hymn in his bedroom but then, as he explained later, this was how he began all his days, by praying and praising God, not even something he saw as a duty but as, in his words, a “pleasure” and “privilege”. Headteachers can sometimes, secretly, pride


themselves in feeling they are pretty virtuous and I suppose I have sometimes been guilty of that. Beside Joshua, however, especially over the first day or two, I felt quite the opposite: an unworthy soul, preoccupied with petty concerns, finding my solace in trivial things, one of god’s lesser servants at best. At the same time, there was an unalloyed delight


to be had in his company. In a very short time he was part of the family, though a strangely dressed one, insisting on wearing a beige raincoat both outdoors and


in, perhaps a forgivable eccentricity when I reminded myself that he had stepped out of an Indian summer into one of the worst English winters in living memory. With Joshua we could just be ourselves and he could


join in, whether giggling with us over a particularly stupid episode of I’m a Celebrity, sitting straight- backed on our crumpled sofa to demonstrate the ideal position for meditation, or peering over the newspaper as if he was studying the sacred text before reading aloud with reverence a particularly fatuous article about the man he constantly – and by no means ironically – referred to as “the great David Beckham”. One particular memory will always stand out:


a night when we set up an improvised table tennis table in the hall and learned a lesson on humility as Joshua showed himself to be the possessor of a deadly backhand smash. In an hour he had beaten us all, from the youngest to the oldest, giggling all the time as he flew around the hall in his flapping raincoat, with an energy extraordinary for a man in his mid-60s. The 10 days of the visit raced by and, before we


knew it and long before we wished it, the battered suitcase had been packed and Joshua was standing at the garden gate, the famous coat now looking a bit worse for wear, but surrounded now by a new army of devoted fans, bereft at seeing him go. Our words then were full of promises about future meetings, but we didn’t know then – and I can still hardly believe – that they would never take place. Just a few months after the visit Joshua Jayakumar


was in a car which was hit by a lorry and though the others in the vehicle survived, he did not. When I broke the news to my wife and children and


we all of us sat shocked, immobile, before weeping together it was tempting to think that this is the price one pays with exchanges, the risk that such things can happen, that friendships can, through nobody’s fault, be violently shattered. And yet, if Joshua Jayakumar had not come at all, how much poorer would our lives have been? When I visit Dornakal this year, I hope to find and


talk to Joshua’s wife and children – and do not know if they will understand all that is in my heart and what I want, even need, to say. Perhaps they will understand, however, if I simply show them the picture I have on my desk: of Joshua standing hugging his coat on the bitter cold but still smiling, almost as if it were, somehow, the very first smile in the world.


SecEd


• Alistair Macnaughton is head of The King’s School in Gloucester.


An


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