As 2002 gave way to 2003 the world grew fearful that the Americans and the British, relying on what came to be known as the ‘dodgy dossier’, would invade Iraq, so continuing its’ “War on Terror” started by the bombing of the Twin towers in New York in 2001. Flying to Dubai to address a four-day conference of the British Schools of the Middle East in late Januarydrew me dangerously close to the possible conflict. In retrospect that flight, and the couple of months that followed, have assumed a real poignancy both in terms of the Initiative’s thinking, and the relationship of education to a dramatically different world view. There were several key events which conspired over a short period of time….
The first of the key events was Dubai, which must be one of the most extreme examples of a country marked by the turbulent changes of the last half-century. When the British pulled out of the Gulf in 1971 Dubai was little more than the tiny capital of a kingdom of warring sheiks. (see Chapter 18 of “Master and Apprentice”) Then oil was discovered, not a vast amount but enough, it was calculated, to give the kingdom a thirty year spending spree which the ruling family decided was sufficient to turn Dubai into an Arabian version of Beirut – a flesh-pot of the kind that could satiate the needs of the nouveau riche, both from the Gulf and from the Indian Ocean. It is an amazing place.
Dubai’s airport was enormous. Massive billboards proclaimed ‘Fly. Buy. Dubai’; an apparent consumer’s paradise. The fear of war subsided a little as I was driven to the hotel, but the mood of the sixty-five or so delegates was far more sombre. A number of Head teachers had cancelled at the last moment. The English School in Baghdad had long been closed, but the heads of several of the schools in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar had decided to remain at home, so uncertain was the political climate.
I could get no feel for Dubai. My hotel room was as well appointed (and anonymous) as any in New York, London or Berlin; the cuisine was as nouvelle as anywhere else where the rich ate, and the ‘What’s on in Dubai’ guide could have come from Amsterdam. Was Dubai to exemplify the ‘end-point’ of western materialism? Was this what the British economy was supposed to be emulating?
At heart I, always the geographer, set out to explore the far end of the Creek, well beyond the city limits, where I heard that two great dhows were being built on the beach. Every bit of twenty-five metres in length, they seemed quite enormous from the ground. There were some fifteen men working on the two boats and behind them were large stacks of uncut tree trunks, and a saw pit where this timber – mainly tropical hard woods brought in from India and Pakistan – was cut into planks and ribs. It was nearing their lunchtime, and a goat killed earlier that day was being cut up into pieces and cooked as kebabs on an open wood fire.
These men had arrived eighteen months before, commissioned by a Dubai merchant to build two large deep-sea sailing dhows. They had rented a stretch of beach for two years and turned this into a temporary shipyard. “Some of us are Indians, some Pakistanis; one of us is from Iran and four from Arabia” I was told. In answer to my question about an architect’s plan, the leading carpenter shrugged his shoulders, “We didn’t need any plan on paper,” touching his head, “it’s all in here”.
Sitting on a baulk of timber, their self-appointed leader, picking his words carefully and relying on others to help him find the correct words, asked, a profound question, “We come from different countries and we belong to three or four different religions. We love each other as if a big family and we love God in different ways. So why are you Christians trying to kill the Moslems in Iraq? Is it that you – who already have so much – are greedy for their oil?” Another prodding the fire and picking his words carefully, reiterated the statement “the chief of carpenters says that he wants you to know that we are all brothers beneath the skin”.
I was transfixed by the scene and the conversation – I could have been on the beach in Galilee two thousand years before. Suddenly the spell was broken as three military aircraft flying low over the creek rudely shattered the peace.
* * *
Pondering that phrase “Brothers beneath the skin”, I returned to meet the head teachers. Those people knew all about the minutiae of school administration, but realised that matters of that kind could be delegated but what they could never delegate, however, was their responsibility to think strategically – that was why I had been invited to address them. In age they ranged from a couple in their early thirties to several whose teaching careers went back almost as far as mine to the late 1960s. “By and large,” one said, “we learnt our craft in England when teachers in those days were expected to use their professionalism on a day-to-day basis to make decisions. Nowadays, it seems to us, this professionalism has been replaced by the need to follow a prescribed set of actions defined by some nameless official who can have no real understanding of the dynamics of an individual classroom. We prefer being overseas,” they told me, “because we have more opportunities to work things out for ourselves without having an advisor or an inspector always standing close by. The flip side of this is that we don’t have much job security.”
The conference was much concerned with the relationship of primary to secondary education – the transition from dependent child to independent adult often difficult time for both parents and teachers to accept Adolescents are impulsive, and that scares parents and teachers alike because such behaviour is potentially risky. This was the heart of my argument. A too heavy an emphasis in adolescence on sitting listening to instruction in the classroom actually nullifies the potential for creativity, enterprise and personal responsibility that these tempestuous years exemplify. Too heavy an emphasis on instruction during these years deprives the young person, possibly forever, of developing sufficient personal creativity to take control of their own destiny, and can create instead a dependency in later life on ‘systems’. This kind of opting-out is destructive of individual and community responsibility.
I explained that there is something in the underlying principles which Western countries are applying to education that has resulted in the most awful unintended consequences of narrow thinking, dependency and a sense of detachment from everyday world problems. Young people are far too often lulled into a false sense of security by the good, caring teacher (and the good, caring parent) to the point where they miss out on developing their own sense of direction and control. “If the youngest children were to receive an education that consciously sought to give them a progression of skills and attitudes which, as they grew older, would put them more in charge of their own learning, this would release that deep-seated urge to be responsible for themselves when it is at its strongest. We all – adults, teachers, parents, administrators and, above all politicians – have a vital lesson to learn; we have to give up so much of the control function that has dominated education for far too long. All of us need to work towards that defining moment for each child when, as a mark of the sheer quality of the education they’ve received, we have such confidence in them that we know that it’s in their best interest to go forward on their own. A few will make mistakes, but most will learn to correct them.”
Addressing those English-trained teachers quietly perspiring in the heat of Dubai, “Presently the challenge in England is that we know we need quality education but most people don’t feel seriously enough to recognise what this will actually involve. This is essentially a political issue for both England and America (the two leading the attack on Iraq) have experienced political double speak for generations. Politicians may say that education is at the top of their agenda but unless their constituents have a vision of what quality education for all really means, they will never hold their politicians to account. Too many of their populations fall for the politicians’ explanation that the problem is with the teachers, not with society at large. If my explanation is right then that means the problem rests squarely with each one of us.
“Unless we, as knowledgeable members of a Democracy, are prepared to tell people what is going wrong with the experiences of young people, and what needs to be done to rectify the situation, we shouldn’t be surprised that politicians simply opt for the course of least resistance – they stick with the status quo, and add a few further frills of their own.”
John Scarth, the headmaster of the British School in Muscat, got up to close the conference. “I’m a pretty conservative kind of person, otherwise I wouldn’t be a head teacher,” he said deprecatingly, “I like my comfort zone. However since coming to the Oman I realise that you don’t have to go into the dark, but if you want to see the stars in all their glory you have to dare to go deep into the desert, away from the light pollution of civilisation. Only then, when your eyes become acclimatised to real darkness, can you begin to appreciate the sheer brilliance of the stars. Then, and only then, will you see which way to go.
“That’s exactly what these four days have done for us. You have shown us the reality of the situation, and that is difficult. But you have shown us the brightness of the vision as well. None of us can say we don’t know which way we ought to go. As English people working in an international arena what you’ve said, and the words of that chief of the dhow builders, ‘we are all brothers beneath the skin’, give us a lifetime’s – and life-changing – agenda to run with.”
* * *
The second key event occurred two days later, on a bitterly cold February afternoon, I was back in Britain addressing the first of three L.E.A. conferences where the mood of teachers was very different. Concerned as everybody was about the international situation, teachers in England were nothing like as idealistic and resolved to change a tired system as were their colleagues in the international schools.
The following day, feeling like so many others in Britain and other Western countries, my family and I joined, for the first time ever, a political march – the’ Stop the War’ march in London, which attracted, according to various estimates, between 1 and 2.5 million people. Despite the impressive numbers it failed to change the minds of politicians. Ten years later The Guardian noted that “the 15th February 2003 will go down in history as the final moment that Britons demonstrated a touching faith in parliamentary democracy.” The feelings of so many people were ignored in the cynical war that was about to start. It was probably the first time that so many people had taken to the streets in England but for most it was also the last.
“When they couldn’t stop the war,” Tariq Ali wrote ten years later, “most of them never came out again. It was a huge show of anger but it left, in my opinion, no lasting legacy. We live in a world that is so totally dominated by capitalism it’s not really surprising. This is what we’re now left with – simply celebrating anniversaries.” For whole swathes of people it was the most disillusioning experience…..hope, anger, betrayal……this was the mass protest that defined a generation.”
The Guardian noted in 2013 “British Democracy took a body blow… the shadow of the largest demonstration in British history still hangs over British democratic politics. If our politicians wonder why they are held in such low esteem, it is not just their fiddling of expenses, nor their prolonged bipartisan infatuation with bankers and Rupert Murdoch. The rot began with the dodgy dossier, the duplicitous diplomacy and the decision to ignore the wishes of their own voters in preference to those of George Bush. Mainstream politics brought public contempt with the blood of millions.”
* * *
The third key event was after the March, when I flew to Arusha in northern Tanzania to accept the offer of being taken by a highly experienced and knowledgeable guide to study, at first hand, the Hadza. These are one of the very few groups of indigenous tribes still holding to a life style closely resembling the Stone Age conditions of our distant ancestors. These are what evolutionary psychologists are arguing has deeply shaped the human brain to create mental predispositions that lie dormant in each new generation unless activated by cultural challenges. While this may seem to have been so different to the events on the international sphere as to be irrelevant, but in my mind they all come together most dramatically. I had first become interested in studying the behaviours of those peoples by writings of Jared Diamond, Jane Goodall and the tribal people I had been with in the Sahara in Namibia four years before (see attached).
Over the past twenty-five years biomedical technology, with the invention of PET and CAT scans and functional MRI, has enabled scientists to watch – through the transmission of signals from an individual brain measured and wired up to a video display screen – which parts of the brain are involved in particular intellectual or practical experiences. During this same period cognitive scientists have been able to offer far more precise explanations as to how the human brain shapes, processes and stores information.
Within the past dozen years evolutionary psychology has emerged as a new discipline which applies the insights from evolutionary theory to the development of psychological processes. Evolutionary psychology sees that the very structures in the brain that we use today have been shaped by the evolutionary experiences of our distant ancestors, particularly as they adjusted to life on the open savannah. It is these evolved predispositions that enable us to process information, act as social beings, think in particular ways and literally find our way around in life. To note the similarity between the way modern man has become accustomed to live and the way the Hadza retain a Stone Age way of life, could help us develop a better understanding of what a system of learning that consciously “goes with the grain of the brain” would really look like. In other words we can now see back into the distant origins of our species with a clarity that twenty years ago would have seemed like science fiction, and give us a whole new way of looking at contemporary behaviours.
Take all this research together and it is the thesis of the Initiative that it is the human ability to learn (and so be adaptable and flexible) which has given our species such a pre-eminent position in the hierarchy of the animal world, then our multiple ways of learning must have their origins way back in the depths of human history, ninety-eight percent of which was probably lived on the savannah. The better we can understand the conditions which shaped our brains to be inquisitive, adaptable problem-solving organisms, (as well as being dangerously confrontational when psyched up by tribal fury – America versus Iraq?) the easier it should be for us to create learning situations that most effectively draw on our natural aptitudes.
The theory is that the Hadza people appear to have stayed right back where they were sixty thousand and more years before on the edge of the Rift Valley, continuing with behaviour patterns unmodified by significant, subsequent changes. They exist in a kind of prehistoric time bubble. If the mental processes of these people could be properly understood, science might gain an enormous insight into current human behaviours. (All this is graphically described in chapter fifteen of Master and Apprentice). This needs to be properly understood if the sequence of these events, and their conclusions, is to hold together. It is why, in the years since then, I have consistently argued that “we are enormously empowered genetically by the experience of our ancestors, but we are constrained as well, for driven to live in ways which go against the natural grain of the brain simply drives people mad.”
* * *
The fourth key event took place when I stopped off in Istanbul of the Middle Eastern branch of the Young Presidents Organisation. This meeting contained many of the most successful entrepreneurs in those countries around Iraq. “It is the last day of February 2003,” I noted in my daybook, “and as I write this in my hotel room in Istanbul, the sun is slowly lifting the early morning fog over the Bosphorus and the Asian shore is becoming clearer. A large Russian freighter is steaming steadily south, and endless passenger ferries crisscross this historic waterway. To the right is the Golden Horn and beyond the outline of the Topaki Palace, the Mosque of Santa Sophia and the sparkling waters of the Sea of Marmara.”
That peaceful view of Istanbul on that snowy morning shrouded a deeply divided and confused society, as the joint American and British Armies appeared poised to invade Iraq. The previous evening, addressing the Istanbul and Bosphorus Chapter of the Young Presidents’ Organisation I’d heard strong argument expressed. “We Turks are demeaning ourselves. We think we’re driving a hard bargain with the Americans for the use of our bases for a possible war with Iraq. This is not a bargain. We are admitting that we are beggars. What matters more to us – that we are true to basic human rights, or that we admit that we are too poor to be independent?”
‘Too poor’ immediately seemed an incongruous description of these very obviously successful, young entrepreneurs – many were in their thirties and some in their early forties – living in considerable style. As a description of the country as a whole, however, it was accurate. Turkey is undoubtedly poor, and fraught with internal ethnic and national tensions that would come to the fore in the weeks ahead if Turkey became involved in war with Iraq, as first the Kurds, and then probably the Turkomans, saw in the confusion of a possible war a political opportunity.
“If it’s true, John, as you said in your speech, that youngsters learn to become adults by constantly watching and listening to the adults around them, then the home is the cradle of morality,” said one of the younger of these successful businessmen. “In which case what bad role models we are in danger of becoming for our children! Too often we spoil them. There is no point in our moaning that our children just take our wealth for granted if our actions simply imply that money really is the real bottom line”.
It was a fascinating discussion, and one that I had come to see as typical of what would happen when highly successful entrepreneurs came together, whether from a Western Christian tradition or Moslems from the Eastern Mediterranean with the blood of the Phoenicians still flowing in their veins. It was what I had heard in Venice the previous year; how the excitement of inventing a new concept and taking it through to profitable production gave people a buzz. Not simply business people either, most people want to see the significance and end result of what they do. To an extent the money is a side issue, even to the successful. Having started off, often from humble beginnings themselves, many entrepreneurs had learnt how to struggle and constantly assess the ever-changing conditions around them. These people knew the truth of the biblical axiom “The love of money is the root of all evil” better than most of the rest of us.
“If my daughter heard me talk like that”, one of the fathers confided later, “she would despise me. We have many relatives in eastern Turkey who are Kurds, and their relatives live in northern Iraq. Young people who think about these things are highly critical of our generation for being too Machiavellian. Just to learn facts and theories in school is not enough to create wise thoughtful young people. That’s what our country needs. Such young people come – or should come – from the quality of morality experienced within the family”.
The following day as I waited for my luggage back in Heathrow, a Turkish business man got highly excited as he took a message on his mobile phone. His excitement and smile invited question. “Yes”, he said, “the Turkish parliament has just voted against accepting the enormous bribe from the Americans to let them use our bases for their war with Iraq. I know that I’m a business man, but money isn’t the only thing that matters. I am so proud of my country because I can now tell my children that money really isn’t the bottom line. Maybe today Turkey has started to grow up, and maybe this is the beginning of our turning our backs on historic culture that has been based on bribery. I am very happy”.
It was only two weeks later, the 19th March, that the Allies began the invasion of Iraq. The political pressure exerted by the Americans to say that this was in the cause of peace, even though it was not backed up by a United Nations resolution, meant that only Poland and Australia, together with rebellious Iraqis, joined the American-British invasion. We were not to know it at the time, but 6 years later those British and American forces withdrew with their tails between their legs while many voters grew ever more sceptical of ‘conviction’ led political policies.
* * *
The fifth key event occurred two days later when I flew to Singapore with my plane making a wide detour around Iraq and neighbouring airspace so as to avoid the battle zone. I was to address the postponed annual conference of the International Baccalaureate which five months previously had been postponed as some 30 numbers of that conference had been killed in the al-Qaeda attack on Bali – a direct consequence of the Allies military intervention in Afghanistan. This was to be a large conference with some 350 people, but it was a most sober affair, the mood being set by the conference title ‘Terrorism, Tolerance and the Human Spirit: the challenge for international education’. I was to be the opening speaker and I entitled my speech ‘Surely we can do better than this?’
“I wish to address you not solely as teachers, or as parents, or as administrators, or even as diverse members of educational communities. Specifically, I address you as citizens of various democracies, united in our concern to build a world in which there is no place for, or need for, terrorism. And that comes down directly to the way we bring up the next generation of young people worldwide – not just in the privileged schools that you represent, or the advanced economies that you come from, but unless the world starts to bring up its young people to think and behave in a way which would support an equitable world society, I would suggest the world faces a grim future. I have to remind you that you are more powerful than you think you are, for in your classrooms are the young minds and brains that will either make or destroy the planet. That is what this conference is all about; can the human spirit ensure that tolerance and understanding outwits terrorism.”
They were a most attentive audience. So attentive, that in the two years that followed I received many invitations to address individual International Schools in different parts of the world. “Your schools will have to change,” I said, “I therefore make three suggestions. Firstly, if our pupils are to become qualified to act as stewards of our humanity then we need a curriculum that ‘joins things together’ rather than splits them apart. A curriculum that values synthesis as much as analysis. A curriculum that honours emotion, individual experience, and spiritual values. “Education”, wrote Vaclav Haval three years ago, “is the ability to perceive the hidden connections between disparate phenomena.”
“Secondly, we need to honour a process of learning that “goes with the grain of the brain”. You need to honour the principle of Subsidiarity. It has been the failure to do this over recent years that has given us a strangely ‘detached’ intelligentsia – people who know how to make all the right arguments, but never feel themselves competent enough to do anything about it.
“Thirdly, we need to ensure that our young people really do know what it is that makes us humans tick. We are indeed a wondrously ingenious species, but the confusion about our moral values also makes us extraordinarily dangerous. So ingenious are we that our generation is the first to have the knowledge to blast our part of the universe to pieces. We have become so enamoured with immediate gratification, and the so-called rights of the individual, that we are forever marginalising the most vulnerable group in society – the children.”
I really believe we can do all these things, but we will have to strain every sinew of our imagination and daring to do what inertia has so often prevented us from doing in the past. We have no alternative, for, as the North American Indian Chief Seattle put it: “We have not inherited this world from our parents; we have been loaned it by our children”.
When I hear politicians saying that our children have to reach ever higher standards I want to slip in an addendum, “we adults have to be better advocates for the real needs of these youngsters who will become our guardians as we become old because, at the moment, it is we who have not got our acts together.” I paused rather dramatically, and then repeated, “we have to be better advocates…. it is we who have to get our acts together”.
There are other issues which need to be recorded for that year, largely based on the summary of the last nine months; also to include comments on the training programmes, political climate and the writing of the latter part of Master and Apprentice, the establishment of an Advanced Centre, the office in Bath, and the beginnings of the expansion of the Canadian programme.
The Summary of the last nine months of 2003 (to be completed)
1) Diary for the year:
| JAN | Sherborne School for Girls | Dorset |
| Kingswood School | Bath | |
| Leicester Training Day | Leicester | |
| CoEd Year ESGOB County Primary School, Llantrisant | Wales | |
| Berlin British School | Germany | |
| YPO | Scotland | |
| Gosport and Fareham Head Teachers’ Conference | Dorset | |
| FEB | COBISEC, Dubai | United Arab Emirates |
| Edmund Rice Sinon Secondary School, Arusha | Tanzania | |
| North Wales Secondary Head Teachers’ Conference, Llandudno | Wales | |
| CAPH Residential Partnership Conference | Cumbria | |
| 16th Annual Hobhouse Lecture, Bruton | Somerset | |
| Claydon Pyramid of Schools | Ipswich | |
| Ceifin Institute in Ennis, Co Clare | Ireland | |
| Istanbul | Turkey | |
| MAR | Northumberland 1st School Head Teachers Conference | Newcastle |
| Cluster of 1st Schools | Great Yarmouth | |
| National Creativity Conference | Oxford | |
| 18th Annual IBAP Conference | Singapore | |
| APR | Cheshire Head Teachers’ Conference | Stoke-on-Trent |
| Crediton Academic council Conference | Dawlish | |
| Southend on Sea Borough Council Training Programme | Southend on Sea | |
| MAY | Junior Heads’ Conference, The Hague | Netherlands |
| Education, Libraries & Leisure Services Training Programme | Liverpool | |
| Liverpool Primary Heads’ Assoc. Conference | Liverpool | |
| National Primary Trust International Conference | Wolverhampton | |
| JUNE | The Institute of Education | London |
| Birmingham Primary Heads’ Conference, Alton Towers | Staffordshire | |
| Birmingham Primary Heads’ Conference | Birmingham | |
| Secondary Head Teachers’ Conference | North Tyneside | |
| Senior Leadership Conference | Newcastle | |
| National College for School Leadership | Nottingham | |
| JULY | Specialist Schools Trust’s Inaugural Conference | Manchester |
| Middle Years Conference, Sydney | Australia | |
| Nat’l Commission on Education, Nuffield Foundation | London | |
| NOV | Southend on Sea Borough Council Training Programme | Southend on Sea |
| George Sorros Foundation | Slovenia | |
| Primary and Secondary Heads’ Conference, Port Talbot | South Wales | |
| Reading Head Teachers Conference | Ascot | |
| Association International Schools of Africa, Ghana | North Africa | |
| Royal and Sun Alliance | Bath | |
| IBO online Global Conference | online | |
| Education Policy Centers Conference | Slovakia | |
| Southend on Sea Borough Council Residential Training Courses | Southend on Sea | |
| Four Oaks Cluster Training Programme, Sutton Coldfield | Birmingham | |
| Shoeburyness Development Programme | Southend on Sea | |
| British School in Tokyo | Japan | |
| Yokohama International School | Japan | |
| Sandwell Metropolitan Council | Sandwell | |
2) Training Programmes: (to be completed)
|
Financial Statements 2000 – Present |
||||||||||
| 1999-2000 | 2000-01 | 2001-02 | 2002-03 | 2003-04 | 2004-05 | 2005-06 | 2006-07 | 2007-08 | 2008-09 incomplete | |
| Earned Income | 75,012 | 133,674 | 83,192 | 73,364 | 100,439 | 101,304 | 123,187 | 117,862 | 94,201 | 51,199 |
Birmingham, Manchester, Tameside, plus others
Note: earned income from training programmes and conferences…
3) The writing of the latter part of ‘Master and Apprentice: Reuniting thinking with doing’ took place last three quarters of 2003. The evolutionary part (the distance past); the recent past, and the first part of ‘the here and now’ were only partially influenced by the Initiative’s current activities. Much of the ‘here and now’, starting with chapter 14 “High Politics and Responsible Subversives” leading into chapter 15 and the whole of “Our Possible Futures” beings chapters 17, 18, 19, were directly influenced by the events of 2003. “Heirs to a mighty inheritance” seemed to be lost (was it ever written?) while the Postscript written six months into 2004 ties the whole thing together.
4) Political situation in England (to be completed later)
5) Plans for the establishment of an Advanced Centre for the Study of Human Learning later to be replaced by an office in Bath with space for several hundred teachers a year to study the ideas of the Initiative and to use its library, which by then extended to some five thousand books.
Plans for a Centre replaced by the need for an office in Bath (trace how this led to the optimistic assumption of using the soon to be acquired offices in Bath to act as a training centre for LEAs across England) (in 2003-4 Manchester alone was saying that it would fund places for 200 of its teachers to attend week long conferences in Bath in the following year) (discussions with local hotels about accommodation) (the beginnings of the Canadian interest)
Presentations during 2003:
|
2003 |
JAN | Sherborne School for Girls | Dorset | |
| Kingswood School | Bath | |||
| Leicester Training Day | Leicester | |||
| CoEd Year ESGOB County Primary School, Llantrisant | Wales | |||
| Berlin British School | Germany | |||
| YPO | Scotland | |||
| Gosport and Fareham Head Teachers’ Conference | Dorset | |||
| FEB | COBISEC, Dubai | United Arab Emirates | ||
| Edmund Rice Sinon Secondary School, Arusha | Tanzania | |||
| North Wales Secondary Head Teachers’ Conference, Llandudno | Wales | |||
| CAPH Residential Partnership Conference | Cumbria | |||
| 16th Annual Hobhouse Lecture, Bruton | Somerset | |||
| Claydon Pyramid of Schools | Ipswich | |||
| Ceifin Institute in Ennis, Co Clare | Ireland | |||
| Istanbul | Turkey | |||
| MAR | Northumberland 1st School Head Teachers Conference | Newcastle | ||
| Cluster of 1st Schools | Great Yarmouth | |||
| National Creativity Conference | Oxford | |||
| 18th Annual IBAP Conference | Singapore | |||
| APR | Cheshire Head Teachers’ Conference | Stoke-on-Trent | ||
| Crediton Academic council Conference | Dawlish | |||
| Southend on Sea Borough Council Training Programme | Southend on Sea | |||
| MAY | Junior Heads’ Conference, The Hague | Netherlands | ||
| Education, Libraries & Leisure Services Training Programme | Liverpool | |||
| Liverpool Primary Heads’ Assoc. Conference | Liverpool | |||
| National Primary Trust International Conference | Wolverhampton | |||
| JUNE | The Institute of Education | London | ||
| Birmingham Primary Heads’ Conference, Alton Towers | Staffordshire | |||
| Birmingham Primary Heads’ Conference | Birmingham | |||
| Secondary Head Teachers’ Conference | North Tyneside | |||
| Senior Leadership Conference | Newcastle | |||
| National College for School Leadership | Nottingham | |||
| JULY | Specialist Schools Trust’s Inaugural Conference | Manchester | ||
| Middle Years Conference, Sydney | Australia | |||
| Nat’l Commission on Education, Nuffield Foundation | London | |||
|
2003 |
NOV | Southend on Sea Borough Council Training Programme | Southend on Sea | |
| George Sorros Foundation | Slovenia | |||
| Primary and Secondary Heads’ Conference, Port Talbot | South Wales | |||
| Reading Head Teachers Conference | Ascot | |||
| AISA, Ghana | North Africa | |||
| Royal and Sun Alliance | Bath | |||
| IBO online Global Conference | online | |||
| Education Policy Centers Conference | Slovakia | |||
| Southend on Sea Borough Council Residential Training Courses | Southend on Sea | |||
| Four Oaks Cluster Training Programme, Sutton Coldfield | Birmingham | |||
| Shoeburyness Development Programme | Southend on Sea | |||
| British School in Tokyo | Japan | |||
| Yokohama International School | Japan | |||
| Sandwell Metropolitan Council | Sandwell |
