{ INTERVIEW }
INDEPENDENTLY SPEAKING
T
imed to coincide with the season of Open Days, the ‘Education Special’ is a staple of the regional, glossy magazine, complete with the obligatory ‘Meet the Head’ interview. Usually, this means a series of safe questions are emailed over, and the carefully chosen words are returned, after some vetting from the school’s marketing department. And you have an interview that could have been lifted straight from the school’s professional prospectus. In fact, you could quite easily replace the name of the school and the photo with that of another Head Teacher and no-one would be any wiser. This is a great shame, as our Head Teachers, whether from state or independent schools, are worth listening to. All are intellectual, driven and influential. There can be few issues of more importance to any society than education, and our Heads know more about the topic than anyone else. One of the region’s finest independent schools is Hurstpierpoint College, or Hurst for short. Tim Manly has been the Head for almost ten years
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and has presided over a very successful period with considerable expansion. Gamely, Mr Manly agreed to meet Ian Trevett to discuss some real education issues... The absence of debate or the tackling of contentious issues in education features has long been a source of frustration, as education is so deeply rooted in the make-up of our society. So it was quite a relief when Tim Manly agreed wholeheartedly to this interview and invited me to ask any question I wished. I happily obliged, but first an introduction to the man who has run the historic Hurst College for very close to a decade is in order. “I graduated in 1986/87 at the height of the Thatcher boom, during the Lawson years, and like most people I went to London. I was thinking about two careers: teaching or joining the Met police. I still wonder from time to time what would have happened if I had taken the other path. The idea of going from school to university and back to school again was not appealing, so I ended up working for an American firm of headhunters.
Tim Manly, Headmaster of Hurst, on politics, Eton, social mobility and the importance of giving. Interview by Ian Trevett
“I was doing a Masters at the LSE as well, and when I was 30, there was one of those defining moments where my oldest child had been born, and I wasn’t seeing very much of him. The company was talking about sending me out to Hong Kong, and it was at that moment I had to decide whether to go into teaching or sell my soul forever. I went to Cambridge to train and loved it, but I was thinking, ‘I’m a classicist. Noone wants a classicist anymore. Who wants a Latin degree these days?’ But, fortunately, I got a job at Sevenoaks School. “While I was at Sevenoaks, it switched entirely to the International Baccalaureate and went through rapid growth and improvement, very exciting times. I realised very quickly that this was absolutely the best decision I’d made. After a few years I went up to Oakham in the Midlands. Great place - Rutland, England’s smallest county and a lovely school. I was appointed by the Head, Tony Little, and worked with him for a while before he went off to be Head at Eton.