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Girls’ school rules: former head of St Paul’s Girls’ School Clarissa Farr on her new book



Headteachers aren’t meant to swear, so when Clarissa Farr says the F-word it feels transgressive. Farr, who was High Mistress of St Paul’s Girls’ School from 2006-2017, is quoting her son’s advice for reading bad Amazon reviews. “He told me, ‘F**k it, mum,’” she says in her Received Pronunciation accent. Happily, her book, The Making of Her: Why School Matters, has been well received. She wrote it in six months after leaving St Paul’s, taking a provocative look at our education system. 

Each chapter begins with a to-do list, which blends her working and home lives. A typical one reads: “Assembly, organise scholarship, daughter’s dental appointment, buy Marmite!”

“It’s the way many women live,” says Farr, who has impeccable poise (her mother was a dancer), high cheekbones and a spirited glint in her eye. “On one channel you are wondering if there’s food in the fridge, on the other it’s work. More often than not it’s the women who do this planning. It puts extra pressure on them.” Farr’s probing of the status quo can ruffle feathers. At the start of the summer she garnered attention for saying womens’ appearance at work matters. “We have to be honest about the way the relationship between the sexes has evolved,” she says now, over jasmine tea (1pm is too late for her to drink coffee). “Working environments are different for women: they are looked at. Progress in your career is subject to male-constructed gateways and it’s naïve to pretend the way a woman looks is not playing a part.”

Former pupils remember Farr baking bread on stage in assembly to dispel the message of a former head that girls should think, not cook. “I felt we’d moved on. We’re in that post-feminist stage where we can say we like to cook and also think, so disabled the fire alarm and took my bread machine on stage.”

Farr brought a rounded approach to St Paul’s, thinking of it as a community. There’s no school uniform there and it’s known for high standards and league-topping results. But she is concerned that schools are placing too much value on assessment. “Teachers don’t want to spend hours doing evaluation,” she says. “We’ve become cowardly and boxed in by our insistence on every bit of progress having to be provable and measured. It’s made teaching duller.

“The world is full of people desperate to reinvent education. My abiding feeling is there are a limited number of ways you can improve on a fantastic teacher. People make big claims about transformative approaches but all of them are reduced to the same thing. We’ve lost the courage to be ambitious about the curriculum in a free, untrammelled way.” 

Farr likes to think she left St Paul’s “a more relaxed place. Some like to think of it as uptight, competitive and not very kind”. She’s interested in the impact of space on learning. In her time there, Farr handled most challenges “by encouraging students to come forward and talk”.  

For example, “with trans pupils, sharing bathrooms came up. Identifying as male in a girls’ school could become a problem. If an individual is more comfortable remaining in a girls’ school we’d allow that. We’d think about distinguishing between exploratory behaviour and what is more deep-seated.”

Smartphones were also tackled with discussion. “I was concerned that girls were about to fall over because they were looking at their phones. We didn’t have a ban; we are past that stage but we managed it. Rather than prohibition let’s try and find our phones as boring as we can and do something else.

“With almost everything, when you have something you want to discourage or move away from, the best thing is not to focus on that but on creating what you do want. We dealt with conflicted attitudes to eating by having incredibly attractive, delicious, healthy school food cooked by people the girls got to know, creating a positive culture.”

Parent management was significant. “Affluent neglect is a thing,” she says. “Parents try to compensate for their lack of being present in material ways, which are counterproductive, usually.”

She shrugs off the campaign to abolish private schools, spearheaded by Ed Miliband. “The demonisation of the private sector, which educate around seven per cent of the country’s children, is using up a lot of energy that could be directed at the national picture and a collaborative rather than divisive approach. Not all private schools are outstanding. We have to work to make sure all children have access to a high standard of education, to break down financial barriers with more scholarships, use of facilities and connection between the sectors. When education is made political it is no longer about the children, it is about electability.”

Farr has happy memories of school — she was a weekly boarder at Bruton School for Girls in Somerset. “I remember certain teachers who I adored. We had a fantastic gymnastics coach who gave us incredible confidence. Risk assessment wouldn’t allow what we did now but it was so exhilarating.” She struggled with maths. “I was typical of the kind of girl who decided they weren’t good at maths early on and never got over it. Socially it’s ok to say you’re not good at maths but it’s not OK to say you can’t read. We need to change that attitude. It wasn’t until I started at St Paul’s, where there is the most engaging approach to science that I thought if I’d had this my life would’ve been different.” 

Was she ever naughty? “One Latin teacher was dull and we passed time by writing notes in the style of Pliny.” Seeing that I’m not impressed, she admits: “I admired the really naughty girls but I wasn’t as daring as them.”

The book is dedicated to her parents, Alan and Wendy. “When I have a problem I think about what my father would have advised,” she says. He was a banker who was 50 when she was born. “Once he came to collect me from a piano lesson and the teacher said, ‘Your grandfather is waiting.’ I hoped my father didn’t hear that as it would upset him.

“My parents had experienced so much by the time they had me and my brother that they didn’t feel displaced. People talk about sibling rivalry but I think parental/child rivalry is less discussed. In my experience older parents experience less rivalrous relationships.”

Farr had her daughter at 37 and her son at 39. Her daughter, who did not go to St Paul’s, is in film production and her son, who went to St Paul’s Boys’, has just qualified as an actor. She is divorced from their father, sports writer John Goodbody. “I didn’t marry until I was 35, everything happened later,” she says. “It worked well, I’d established my career, I wasn’t at a stage where I resented that I couldn’t go clubbing. But having children is an organic event, it’s not part of your career — your career can work around it whenever you have them.  There isn’t a right answer.”

Working in a single-sex school also happened organically. “It was more doable for a woman to seek promotion into senior management at a girls’ school. I’ve become an advocate for young women and because I’ve seen them in girls’ schools I’m aware of what it can do for them. There’s far less sense of your gender being relevant because everyone is doing everything.”

She was at a joint concert with the boys’ school when she decided to leave St Paul’s. “It felt like a pinnacle, like now I should give this beautiful thing to someone else to take forward.” 

The school gave her a fond send-off, composing a piece of music for her and with a speech about the strange haircut she had when she arrived: “It looked a bit like a helmet.” Her actual departure, though, was understated. “I was in jeans and T-shirt clearing out the boxes, leaving a card for my successor and locking the office door. Job done. I put away my uniform of headship and just left things as neat as possible for my successor.”



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