Motivational maxims, inspirational adages and amusing aphorisms can all shed light on the challenges facing today’s school leaders, according to Headteacher Jonathan Fawcett.

I'm just saying...

My love of quotations probably dates from the time my mother brought me home a book called Caught by Keating. Edited by the sports journalist Frank Keating, it was a collection of the best-known, wittiest and most pertinent sporting quotations from the 1970s.

Some that stuck in my mind were a boxer’s wife who responded to criticism of her husband’s lack of a meaningful left hook by protesting, “If you don’t think he can punch, you should see him putting the cat out at night.”

An Australian pace bowler goaded an English batsman by claiming, “To get him out you don’t have to bowl fast, you just have to run up fast.” A rugby league coach revealed his fondness for horticulture by telling us, “We are breeding a nation of pansies.”

Framed quotations

Today, my office wall is adorned with framed quotations. Some are from inspiring leaders, others give lifestyle advice and the rest are just randomly amusing. One of my favourites is: “No man on his death-bed ever said ‘I wish I’d spent more time at the office’.”

Colleagues send me their favourite quotations, friends buy me books of them and our site manager has even put some up above the urinals in the male staff toilets. I am unable to deliver an assembly or staff meeting without including at least one.

One of my particular favourites is from Martin Luther King: “We judge ourselves not by where we stand in times of comfort and convenience, but by where we stand in times of conflict and controversy.”

It goes well with the one from Roy Disney (entrepreneur and Walt’s nephew): “It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.”

Values, dealing with conflict, moral leadership – it’s not too big a leap to get from there to school leadership and some of the challenges that we’re all currently facing.

But it’s not just the rich and famous who can deliver a line worth remembering and repeating. Clive, our ex-governor, always used to say: “Don’t complain about, complain to.”

When I link that with the words of Disney and King, it gives a strong message about standing up for what you believe in and what’s right and not letting people get away with doing things for self-interest and that breach the laws of moral leadership.

It turns out that this hatred of poor form and injustice is hereditary. My grandfather lied about his age to go and fight in the trenches in the Great War and my own father spent time in the glasshouse for insubordination during Second World War training. His crime? Standing up to an officer and refusing to let him bully a defenceless recruit.

My father would frequently embarrass me as a child by standing up for what was right. He instilled in me a sense of honour and fair play but, like most sons, I didn’t appreciate his wisdom until I was older. As one of the worst behaved boys at my Church of England (CofE) grammar school, my partners in crime and I were happy to pay the consequences of our (never malicious) misdemeanours, designed to amuse us when we got bored of copying notes from the board into our jotters and then into our exercise books.

Unwritten contract

It was effectively an unwritten contract: you can mess about all you like but if you do, this is the punishment. As long as the contract was adhered to, we never complained. But the day all of the boys, and none of the girls, were given a detention for vandalising the roller blackboard in our tutor room, we marched to the headmaster’s office and complained, vociferously. Even at that tender age we knew it was wrong for those who had power to use it indiscriminately. My own 12 year-old now attends my school and I’ve seen the same traits in him. In Year 7, he had a scrape with two 15-year-old girls who were picking on some girls in his tutor group; he recently got a detention for arguing with a teacher who’d given a ‘formal warning’ to a friend for something that he knew he hadn’t done.

I’m not condoning those behaviours but I couldn’t tell him off for them either, because I know that he’s learnt them from me.

I’m very clear about where I stand in both times of comfort and times of conflict. “All it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.”

That’s why I’m not afraid to stand up for what is right.

Jonathan Fawcett is Headteacher of Swanwick Hall School in Derbyshire and ASCL’s National Membership Officer.

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Last Word always welcomes contributions from members. If you’d like to share your humorous observations of school life, email Permjit Mann at leader@ascl.org.uk ASCL offers a modest honorarium.

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