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The SERVICE Woman
Interview & Words Phadria Prendergast
As CEO of the Mulberry Girls Trust and headteacher of Mulberry School for Girls in Tower Hamlets, where she has served for 15 years, Dr Vanessa Ogden is shaping the young female minds of tomorrow.
After studying theology and religious studies at university, Dr Vanessa’s feet first led her to the world of banking, though she quickly discovered that it wasn't a career she wanted to pursue. “I really wasn't sure what I should do next, because, you know, in those days, you sort of had a career for life. You chose your career and that was what you did. It's very different now and I'm glad it's different now.” For Vanessa, it was expected of her to find a job and earn her keep. That wasn’t enough for her. “I looked at three different things,” she recalls. “One of which was teaching and schools,” she continues. “I remember when I started, in that first few weeks of my training as a teacher, it was like waking up suddenly into this world, which was full of colour, life and imagination. It felt very different to where I had been before and I kind of knew instantly, that it was the right fit for me,” I can hear the peace in her tone as she speaks.
Trained at the UCL Institute of Education, Dr Vanessa highlights the importance of building genuine relationships with students. “The fact that as a teacher in your classroom, you stand or fall by what you do in those lessons every day. Part of the thing about teaching, is that you engage your mind with other minds. That's how it works. The connections are really important. The relationships that you have are really important.”
“You really need to understand the experiences of young people and where they are. Every individual in that classroom that you are teaching is important, and every individual has a story and every individual brings with them a set of experiences and dynamics. You have to make all that work for everybody in the room, [and] in a really creative way so that you get the outcome at the end. Dr Vanessa loved it. She loved that it was such a dynamic and creative profession. It depended on the quality of your planning as a teacher; on the quality of your delivery; on the quality of your ability to interconnect. “I found myself quite quickly developing a particular kind of specialism for young women in school. Particularly young women who were often branded as badly behaved or challenging. And, of course, really, that's just about not being supported or educated or provided for in the right way,” she states. I begin to smile. I felt like my heart was smiling too. It was powerful to have someone who thought this way in a position of leadership and especially within a school - one of the key sources that form a young mind’s foundation.
“So we established all sorts of different things,” she continues. “Programmes, clubs, you know, things that were quite specific for them and then ultimately, I found myself applying for the job of headteacher of Mulberry School for Girls, which was then, because I feel there's always been a very specific need for girls and women, which is not often understood and promoted. We sat down to speak more in depth.
“I found myself quite quickly developing a particular kind of specialism for young women in school. Particularly young women who were often branded as badly behaved or challenging. And, of course, really, that's just about not being supported or educated or provided for in the right way.”
Phadria: I think for many students now, it’s difficult for them to find teachers that really inspire them to want to do more. I think back to my own education back in secondary school, particularly, I remember my English teacher and how much passion she taught with. So much so that I can actually remember being in her class and being so inspired by her, that I too wanted to teach. How do you ensure that the teachers continue to inspire the students?
Dr Vanessa: You have to have a passion for education yourself. You have to have a passion for great education and you have to have ambition as well. You know, it's really important that you set a vision for what's possible, even when it doesn't seem possible - and that's important in [a] crisis like covid-19. You need to set the direction of travel and the end point, which is that no child gets left behind, that everybody gets high quality education and it matters more, the more disadvantaged you are as a young person. Your education becomes your meal ticket. It's your way of going out into the world and being who you want to be, and achieving what you want to achieve, regardless of your background. So, you create a body of people around you; like-minded professionals, who believe the same thing, who enjoy that work with youngsters and thrive on that work.
You create a shared intellectual curiosity about what makes great education in an inner city setting for the students and families that you're serving. Whether they're girls or boys, whatever community you are serving, wherever those people come from, that's your job, it’s a public service job and you have to do it well. So, you create that body of people that buy into that vision and see themselves as part of that story - and it's a very real story. We see particularly in covid, it really matters. So you work together collectively.
There has to be a hierarchy because somebody has to make the hard decisions in the end. As the head teacher, that's your job; to make those hard decisions when they come. The aim is to try to not have too many of them [she laughs]. So you try to work collectively. We don't have a terribly hierarchical way of working. It's a very collective, collaborative way of working. I think over the 15, 16 years that I've been a headteacher there, we've become a bit like a village of people; parents we've known for a long time, parents who live in the area, who've sent a number of their children to the school. Staff - we don't have a high rate of staff turnover, because we have this collective feeling about what's important.
“Whether they're girls or boys, whatever community you are serving, wherever those people come from, that's your job, it’s a public service job and you have to do it well.”
Phadria: I love that! Of course you have been a head teacher for almost two decades, I'm sure it isn’t without its challenges. So at those points that you do feel like “OK, can I really do this?” What is it that pushes you or motivates you to keep going?
Dr Vanessa: I think it's that belief in the importance of education and it's belief in the importance of the students that you serve and work with. I use that word “serve” quite a lot, because that is the job essentially, it is a public service job. You are employed to be of service, through education to the children that are given to you and you have no choice of those children, it's like being a parent, really.
The challenge when I left the building on the 20th of March last year and we closed the doors on full life at school - you think about the 15 years of careful work to really construct this group of people, because the school is not the building physically, really. It's the people who are in it.
And I once had a brilliant young boy in one of my classes and we were looking at life and death, and we were trying to describe what it means to see a body where the spirit has left it, but it's no longer alive and and come up with ways of articulating that. He said what I thought was a really profound thing, which is “a body without a spirit is like a school without children.”
That's a big challenge when you're not all in the same space. How [do] you keep everybody together and everybody gunning for that same vision that no child left [is] behind. It's a very sobering moment because, you see the possibility of everything that has been created, disappearing and how you prevent that from happening. You have to roll up your sleeves because, if you believe in the importance of education, you can't let covid, destroy what has been built. The challenge now is to retrieve the things that may have fallen away and bring them back into the picture.
“The school is not the building physically, really. It's the people who are in it.”
Phadria: That is powerful! And for you, what do you believe makes a great teacher? I don't know if you're involved in the recruitment process, I take it that you are. But when you are looking for a teacher, what is it that you're looking for? Or what do you need to see when you are looking for a teacher?
Dr Vanessa: We need to see that those people are absolutely committed to the children that they are going to work with. They need to understand what it means to be a young woman in this particular case. You've got to find the right fit. The people that you're employing have got to be people who will fundamentally walk alongside those young people, and not give up on them and walk that journey together. They've got to also understand that the profession is not about them. The profession is about the students and their families and. So how [do] you bring yourself and all that you are into that mix and use that constructively, to ensure that those young people are still lifted up through their education or lifted by their education in terms of expansion of their minds or their socio economic prospects. You've got to be committed. You got to understand being in a city and you've got to understand what disadvantage means, either because you've experienced it yourself and and worked through it or because you see and can empathise with and fully comprehend what that means. We're looking for the values and the ethics. We do look for a skill in teaching. Of course, you have to be able to teach a very good lesson or an outstanding lesson because the professional craft is important. But we can teach people how to teach, so long as there is the willingness there, it's like any profession, really.
I was very, very fortunate to be able to take some students to the White House just towards the end of the Obama administration and we were very privileged to be able to hear directly from women, particularly, from the different parts of the administration [at] different levels, [with] different responsibilities. They all came and talked about what they do and why they do it. Finally, we had half [an] hour to 45 minutes with the then, first lady. The thing that really struck me about that was that every single layer of the administration, the values, spoke through. Everyone talked about the same values. Everyone was aligned around the same values. Everyone had the same ambition for the United States and for social justice and equality. And I just really hope that if somebody dissected the school and the trust, that you would find the same thing.
“You've got to understand what disadvantage means, either because you've experienced it yourself and and worked through it or because you see and can empathise with and fully comprehend what that means.”
Phadria: I actually saw that image of Michelle Obama and the girls. How did that opportunity come about?
Dr Vanessa: We’ve had a longstanding relationship with the U.S. embassy, although it's been a bit less so in the last few years. We have participated in quite a lot of the embassy’s projects and we always make it a priority. So one of the things that is typical about our work is that, you know, if an opportunity comes, you drop things if you need to, you drop them to take advantage of the opportunity.
So, we were contacted by the U.S. embassy and asked if they can visit. The three or four offices came and they had a look around the school and they said, “would you be interested in a project for young women?” And we said, absolutely, yes, of course, we would be really interested in it and what's involved. So we spent about an hour with those colleagues from the U.S. embassy and then they went away and about two or three months later, we were contacted again and they said “could we bring a group of people over from the states because we'd like to include you as a as a possible place to launch this project for young women, which we're developing.” And we said, OK, of course, that's fine. It has to happen at the school. It can't be anywhere else. We really need this to happen. We need it for the community. We need it for other schools in the area. Three young women go very sadly to Syria from a local school, which is now part of our trust and we were very upset by that. We had to experience a lot of Islamophobia, that we had all been working to combat. And I said, if for no other reason than to show a completely different face of our community.
So we worked really hard to ensure that everything was as open as possible. We talked at length with the people who came to visit. We took a call and they said “we'd love to have your school with the first lady in three weeks time.” So we then had this amazing three week experience of getting the school ready, [and] keeping it confidential. We had Secret Service coming all the time. We had the Metropolitan Police coming all the time, walking the routes, looking at our security. We rehearsed the students once it became public, which was only the Friday before she visited on the Tuesday. We rehearsed the students within an inch of their lives and we just made sure that she had the absolute best time because in the end, that's what people will remember, you know, how they experienced your home or your school.
The other thing that we did was we made sure that every single student had some way of seeing her face to face. We didn't shut the school, only to other visitors. We only had 300 spaces in the hall where her speech would be, but we set up live streaming in the sports hall so that all the rest of the students could go in the sports hall and experience. And she was amazing. She said that once she had heard that this was going to happen, she got them to set up a podium in the sports hall, even though it wasn't originally scheduled. She did her thing in the main hall and then she went straight to the sports hall to speak to the students. That’s very typical of her generosity. Again, it's not about her. It's about the people that she is connecting with. There’s a real humility about that.
Phadria: I love that! And you said something very, very powerful which was that it’s not about her, it’s about the people.
Dr Vanessa: Yeah, but that's it, isn't it. If you're a leader, that's your role. That's your job. And you know, she uses her platform.
Phadria: One thing I wanted to ask was, what are some of the changes that you have made to education since being a headteacher and CEO of the trust?
In the summer, we were really fortunate through the chair of our trust board to be introduced to Mercedes Grand Prix and Mercedes was starting to do some work - as was Sir Lewis Hamilton at the time. Of course, at the time following the events in the US with George Floyd and then the demonstrations here. They were looking to really do some deeply meaningful work within the organisation to address diversity in STEM careers in particular.
So we worked very hard with Mercedes to build what's called a STEM academy. It's a Saturday and holiday school for youngsters in schools that we serve in the east end of London. It's about how we build a pipeline of talent into the industry directly and I think what Mercedes really understood was that you have to invest in people.
And if you're successful, part of your responsibility in being successful - if you want to see it this way, which I do, is to invest in people, to invest the success that you've had in the success of others. And that's precisely what they have done. So they are sponsoring us for five years to run this Saturday and summer school programme and and they sponsor us financially, but the students will [also] have mentors, they will have experiences with people in the industry. We will be able to take them up to Brackley, to [the] Mercedes headquarters there to learn. The idea is that we are also using our connections with our students who've left, because they're at university now and also they're nearer to getting jobs in the industry than our students.
So I chair an organisation that’s a charity called the Fair Education and we look at the national picture. I think what's clear from my experience in the part of London where I serve, which has been extremely painful through covid, [is] that there has been a lot of bereavement. A lot of hardship for people. Hunger has been real for a lot of people, We had to open a food bank very early on and we've served five hundred families within our trust as part of the food bank, on a weekly basis during the last lockdown and just before Christmas. The poverty that has risen to the surface again is really starkly seen and it's disproportionately affecting black and Asian families in particular. And there's other minority ethnic backgrounds, but in the world that I see, it's particularly those of black and Asian heritage, which has been hardest hit.