Remembering Loved Ones Joan Clanchy

Joan Clanchy, Headmistress of North London Collegiate School (NLCS), had no affection for the exam system which put her school at the top of the league tables. When the A* at GCSE was introduced in 1994, she lamented that “we do not need the extra spur. It will lead to nervousness and cramming, which it will be very hard to resist.”

She felt that the British education system had an obsession with exams, which not only unfairly privileged students in schools like hers, who could be coached to attain straight As, but also forced teachers to chase results instead of following their pedagogical instincts.

In 1991 she was made a member of the National Curriculum Council (NCC), where she argued against the Grad- grinds who wanted to introduce exams in Year 9. She resigned her role in 1993 in protest at the English curriculum drawn up by the council, at the request of the Education Secretary John Patten. In accordance with his wishes, the new curriculum renewed focus on grammar, spelling and punctuation, requiring seven-year-olds to know how to use capital letters and full stops, 11-year-olds to use commas correctly, and 16-year-olds commas and semi-colons.

“I pepper my writing with commas,” Clanchy said. “I am a real colon enthusiast. But you build up punctuation gradually through children’s writing, not by teaching the use of the comma at a certain stage.” The proposal which most rankled her, however, was that students should be marked down in oral examinations for speaking in dialect.

In her letter of resignation from the NCC to Patten, she wrote that “the dominant aim has become a curriculum designed for tests, and the result is a model of English teaching which is barren and anti-intellectual”. It was as if, she continued, “the Highway Code had been narrowed down to instructions on the three-point turn”.

A focus on rote learning was the antithesis of the ethos she followed as Headmistress of NLCS, where she set aside time on Thursdays for students to study subjects outside the curriculum and question guests of the School. She also set up a “Young Enterprise” scheme, in which she encouraged her students to “sell each other junk”. She assumed headship of the School in 1986, at a time when the idea of single-sex education was out of fashion. Many boys’ schools, such as Westminster, had begun to accept girls into the Sixth Form, while the finances of private schools in general were precarious. Clanchy believed that single-sex schools such as NLCS afforded girls the chance to build up a confidence that they might not acquire elsewhere. One of her first acts as Headmistress was to abolish domestic sciences, which she regarded as sexist, and she told her girls that while it was impossible for a woman to “have it all”, it was also important to try.

In their attempts to do so, her students could hardly follow a more confident role model than Clanchy herself, who had always believed she was “one of nature’s head girls”. Statuesque and immaculately dressed, she could assume a gaze that one staff member described as “not hostile, but not warm either, simply a look which showed she was weighing up the comment she had heard. It could be disarming but it was pure Clanchy.”

Yet as well as cutting such an imposing figure, she was approachable and believed that the main job of a teacher was to pay attention generously, telling her staff to “cast your bread upon the waters, and it will come back as sandwiches”.

Her desire to spend lavishly to provide the best education for her pupils conflicted with her reluctance to raise fees. After retiring in 1997, she became the chairwoman of governors at St Mary and St John, a state primary school in Oxford, taking pleasure in organising a chess club for the pupils.