FEATURE
ALUMNI PROFILE
CHARLIE TAYLOR Taking on a new position in lockdown is a bizarre experience, no matter how high profile the role. Six months on from becoming HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, Charlie Taylor “still hasn’t met half the staff”, though he has been able to conduct prison visits.
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fter completing a BEd with English and Drama at Homerton in 1988, Charlie taught at various primary schools in south London, becoming increasingly interested in children with behavioural difficulties. After publishing two acclaimed books on toddler and teenage behaviour, Divas and Dictators, and Divas and Doorslammers, he was appointed head of The Willows, a school for children excluded from mainstream education. Under his leadership the school achieved two Ofsted ‘Outstanding’ ratings. Under Michael Gove as Education Secretary, he spent several years at the Department for Education as an expert adviser in behaviour, before moving to the Ministry of Justice where he became Chair of the Youth Justice Board.
What do you remember of Homerton? At the time, everyone was studying education, so it was semi-vocational, though only around 50% actually went into teaching. It was fairly evenly split between the people who had always wanted to teach, and the people who were there because it was a way of being at Cambridge. It was about 90% women, which was a bit of a change after an all-boys school, but I don’t remember that being too strange. If anything, because there were so few boys it meant you got on with people you probably wouldn’t have got on with if it had been 90% boys – we were all thrown together. I still think about some of the children I taught while training. There was a boy who really stuck with me – in fact thinking about it, he may have been the initial reason for my interest in children with behaviour problems.
Had you always planned to go into teaching yourself? No, I thought I was part of the other 50%! I enjoyed my teaching practice but I somehow thought it wouldn’t be for
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me as a career. I started supply teaching in about 1988, and got sucked in. I became interested in children with behavioural difficulties and what made them tick. In 2005, having been working on the pilot for a new educational initiative in Hillingdon, I had visited The Willows and was interested in what they were doing. I wanted to get back into teaching, and thought the head might be due to retire, so I opened the TES and it fell open on the advert for his job.
Your work at The Willows attracted a lot of attention, not least your introduction of ‘tea and toast’ for students and staff. What was the thinking behind that? On a practical level, lots of the children hadn’t had breakfast when they arrived in school, so we needed to get some food into them to enable them to learn. But it was also an opportunity to teach social skills. These were kids who hadn’t sat round a table, who didn’t sit down for dinner with their families. Just sitting and eating with adults and learning to say “could you pass the sugar, please” was hugely valuable. We’d also get teachers to role play conflict, so that the children could see, in a way a lot of them didn’t at home, that it’s possible to resolve disagreements peacefully. You could see, as soon as there was a suggestion of even imaginary conflict, some of them would tense, assuming it would lead to violence. These were kids with very troubled lives, and we’re never going to be able to fix all that. But you never know the good you’re doing and what might stick.
Under the Coalition government, you were appointed as an expert adviser in behaviour to the Department for Education. How was that? I came from the chaos of a failing school, which I had just taken over, that was in real difficulties to Whitehall – it was fascinating to see a government department in action. I produced a “behaviour checklist” that still
