Here’s a little story to keep you going. It concerns Deputy Headteacher at the last school I worked at; one Mrs Denise Fajita: a ‘dough-basher’ by origin – a cooking teacher with a chip on her shoulder, ‘Born-Again Christian’, a bear of very little brain, sworn enemy of the  Arts and anything which involved Creativity, a concept she singularly failed to understand. She was an ‘I-will-be-a-Headteacher-at-any-costs’ Cv-builder.

Well, it came about that the incumbent Heateacher who had thought long and hard about retirement, decided that on balance and taking all things into account, it was time for a rest. The calling of the cool, leafy green arbours of sweet Hayes and a Heateacher/Consultancy at a school therein was simply too strong.

And so it was that this combination of audacious arrogance, twinned with monumental ignorance, Mrs Fajita stood up in the staffroom, during a friday morning meeting shortly before the interviews for the new Headteacher were due to take place, and attempted a lame joke, whose punchline revolved around the fact that at that time, each of the deputies: herself, Greg Hill and Bill Carter all drove Volvos. With true lack of self awareness and comic timing (lack of, I mean) she garbled the words at the critical point and announced to an aghast staff that an appointment was only to be made to someone who had a ‘vulva!’

I mean, I know the school management has been consistently criticised for its gender imbalance, but I felt it a bit of crude indicator of suitability for the post.

© Andy Daly 2010