The challenge of the new
Multicultural, multiracial Macrometropolis Louise Simpson describes headship in the Jardins of Sao Paulo
When I announced to my staff at Bromley High School that I would be taking up a new headship in Brazil I was met with stony silence…. The distance, both culturally and in absolute terms, between a GDST school in leafy south London and a bustling co-ed city school of over a thousand Brazilians in one of the largest cities in the world that most of us remembered from geography A level case studies, seemed enormous, and it took a while for the idea to sink in. I must say, during the period between my appointment and my coming here in August 2014, whilst I had plenty of opportunities to visit my community and get to know them a little in the year before I moved here, there were times when I wondered whether it might not have been a better idea to have chosen somewhere a little more familiar and a little closer to home than Brazil for my first overseas post! I am now in the position, 6 years later, of looking back to the east, across the Atlantic, towards my next post, at Exeter School, where I will take up the headship in September 2020, and I would not have had it any other way. As one starts to reflect on the career choices one makes, and thinks about paving the way and preparing for the next head of St Paul’s, São Paulo, I inevitably turn my thoughts to what I have learned, what I would have done differently, and what I will say to the
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next head, as they prepare to lead this great school community forward. So here are my reflections.
Stay connected
Many people have asked me over the years how different is St Paul’s, as compared to Bromley, and how similar is it to run a school in Brazil compared to London? There are many, many differences, but the similarities are more striking and much more fundamental, and hence, more important. The first thing I had to make sense of was the IB diploma programme and being an IB world school as part of a truly global community. The IB is a phenomenal thing – and I think that as educators, brought up on a diet of GCSE and A levels, we can all learn a lot from the international community of educators that exists beyond our home shores and the idea that a curriculum can have a philosophy and core values at its heart, which is much more than a specification or a set of assessment criteria. The IB is one subset of that community and embraces about 5000 schools of many types worldwide, but within the community of English medium and curriculum schools there are many other subsets, all of which provide support, collaboration and ideas to their members and associates. Being
