From Chalvedon to The Park

In 1979, as I was coming up to four years at Chalvedon, I started applying for jobs in other schools in Suffolk and Norfolk as well as in Essex. At the start of the summer term I moved to a job close to home, at The Park School on the outskirts of Rayleigh, a ten-minute drive from our house. The post was Head of Resources in a relatively new school which had been designed for what they called 'resource-based learning', so the area for which I was responsible - the multi-media library along with a resources centre full of slide projectors, video-players, and cassette tape recorders - was central to the school.

The move meant I had to say goodbye to my form (above) whom I had cared for since I arrived in the school. They were now in their fifth year and I had wanted to see them through to their public exams in the summer but I left Chalvedon at the end of the spring term 1979.

I still have my leaving card from the staff. Having found Chalvedon very tough going when I started in 1975, by 1979 I was part of the furniture and very sorry to leave. By that time a majority of the staff had been recruited into the union of which I was the school representative, and I knew many of them very well both as colleagues and as friends outside school.

I may have been sad to leave but it was time I moved on. The family was growing fast and the new job offered an increase in salary. It was also time I found new challenges in my professional career, though I had no idea how challenging the new job would come to be.