For the first time in its 109 year history, one of Nicosia’s leading private schools will have a woman at the helm. THEO PANAYIDES meets her
It’s the third day of the new school year, and I’m walking from my car to the rather grand main entrance of the English School in Nicosia – possibly the most prestigious, certainly the most venerable private school in Cyprus – down the leafy road that runs along the two-storey sandstone building.
The windows are open, and as I pass below each classroom I can hear snatches of voices, muffled and jumbled together in a kind of scholarly collage – male and female voices, speaking English with strong Cypriot accents (despite its name, the school has a local flavour nowadays), mostly belonging to teachers though sometimes pupils answering questions. “Who wants to…?” says one voice. “What do you think the objective…?” says another. “So you see it helps you to learn more words and have a richer vocabulary…” adds a third. Suddenly, with a shock of recognition, I realise there are kids behind the sandstone walls, scores of them, each with his or her own dreams of the future. Most are still adjusting to new classrooms and new teachers, but by the end of the school year they’ll have moved on, many will have changed significantly, all will have learned something new – and every day, all day, the jumble of voices will be wafting down from the classroom windows, a steady flow of detailed instruction besieging young minds. It’s a huge responsibility.
15 minutes later, I’m standing in a corridor waiting for Deborah Duncan – the new headmistress, and the first woman to hold the top job in the School’s 109-year history. She strides down the corridor, a no-nonsense woman in an olive dress: “Can I help you?” Deborah has close-cropped brown hair and a rather hard, level gaze; she’s a good talker, using phrases like “as you said” and “like you say” to take the edge off her arguments (even when what she’s arguing isn’t what you said at all). She’s candid and apparently can-do, brimming with new ideas. Among other things, an entire school building has been torn down over the summer – students are being temporarily housed in mobile prefab units – and of course will have to be rebuilt. Sounds like a big job. “I’ve just built a new school in the UK,” she replies cheerfully, obviously unfazed by the prospect of a single building.
Deborah’s a Northern girl, born in Scunthorpe, lived in Bradford for the past few years – and we can argue over whether her background is working-class or lower middle-class, but the fact remains that her Dad worked in the steel industry (actually an accountant for British Steel), her Mum was a librarian and she’s the first person in her family to have gone to university, making her a bold choice for the privileged rich kids at the English School. Deborah has mixed memories of her own schooldays (though she ended up becoming Head Girl): “It felt like I had to survive the whole time, because I was in a state school,” she recalls – and it’s telling that she hasn’t placed her own, seven-year-old daughter Elena in the state system. Was she bullied at school? Not really, “I just kept my head down … [But] I felt I was just a small pin in a big system. I didn’t feel like someone was caring about me individually.”
Maybe that’s why, having finally left school, she was in no hurry to go back. She didn’t even think about becoming a teacher till her mid-20s, instead reading French and Spanish at Durham University then getting a job in the Sales & Marketing department of a local brewery. Quite a leap, from selling beer to mentoring children. True, she admits, but her rather unorthodox path taught her “how to run a business, and about corporate issues, which to be honest are very applicable in running a school. Although you’ve got to know about teaching and learning – because that’s the core of what you do – it’s [also] a business. You’ve got staffing issues, you’ve got to balance the budget, you’ve got to bring in income, you’ve got to market the school, etc. And you’ve got to make sure the daily management and running of the school is smooth. So it’s the same as running your own business, really … The only difference is you’re not making a product that’s inanimate, you’re dealing with children.”
Sounds a bit cold, perhaps, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Deborah’s relatively late start, followed by a rapid rise through the ranks – she’s now 43; this is her second post as headmistress, following four years at a school in Wakefield – also means she’s not bogged down by old-fashioned ideas about teaching. Indeed, part of her appeal to the English School Board must’ve been her credentials as a proponent of a new pedagogy: she was part of the Specialist School and Academies Trust in the UK, got involved in educational research (including a visit to China to study teaching methods) and seems to have firm ideas on how schools should be run. Given the recent problems at the English School, I wouldn’t be surprised – though of course this is only my opinion – if someone decided a new broom was needed to sweep the place clean.
Problems? Well, it’s no secret the school’s bicommunal ethos has been under fire in the past few years, with a group of parents up in arms over the banning of Greek and Greek Orthodox symbols and accusing certain teachers of trying to brainwash their kids with leftist propaganda. “My position as the new head is not to have a position,” replies Deborah blandly when I ask about the political issue. “Because I’m English, I haven’t lived through all the things that have happened in this country. My job here is as an educationalist – to make sure every child in the school is treated well, learns, and is not bullied or made to feel uncomfortable. Every child should be safe.” Beyond that, “I don’t have a political view in this country – and it would be inappropriate for me to have one, I’d imagine. It would be arrogant of me to have a view of a country where I’ve only lived for two weeks!”
This makes sense; only a fool would choose to be “drawn into this issue”. Yet her ideas may end up making an impact regardless – and, again, I wouldn’t be surprised if this were part of why she was hired. Caught between parents and teachers, it often seemed like the English School kids had no voice of their own in the fracas – which is exactly the kind of thing Deborah feels strongly about. “One of the things I’d like to explore with the staff,” she explains, “is getting the students to be more independent learners.” Her whole philosophy depends on putting “students at the centre of the learning,” having them “taught to be independent enquirers and learn for themselves, rather than just be filled with facts then dispatched into the world”. The best way to avoid charges of brainwashing, one might say, is to make the students too smart to be brainwashed.
The voices wafting down from those classroom windows may change significantly during Deborah’s tenure, teachers’ voices making way for their pupils’. There’s a “tendency for the teacher to stand at the front and impart knowledge,” she notes, but “one of the reasons the Board have brought me here is to bring some innovation to the school”. Her point is that today’s knowledge won’t be enough for tomorrow’s world: “When you and I were at school, no-one knew what a nanotechnologist was… We can’t prepare children just for the jobs that exist now.”
Is she right? Despite her technocrat’s talk of “stakeholders” and “working parties”, there’s something of the evangelist about Deborah Duncan. It’s no surprise to learn she supported New Labour under Tony Blair – though she’s grown disenchanted with them now, thinks they’re jaded and deplores their tendency to micro-manage – and in
fact her own philosophy is very New Labour-ish, mixing an emphasis on personal empowerment with the so-called smack of firm government. Education should be personal to each child, she believes, the very opposite of the 19th-century system where the pupil had to fit into the institution. The school should adapt to the child, not vice versa, and she mentions how she changed the curriculum to fit “challenging” children in “socially-deprived” areas, e.g. converting the caretaker’s bungalow into a hair salon where girls could take hairdressing classes (this isn’t necessarily what she plans for the English School, she hastens to add). On the other hand, “I didn’t compromise on discipline”, working out a super-efficient system of sticks and carrots (mostly carrots), all recorded on a child’s personal planner which parents signed each week and could also view online. “Some of my kids said it was like Big Brother watching – but it makes them behave.”
Will any of this work in the new environment where she now finds herself? It’s not just that the kids are well-off instead of socially-deprived – it’s also that Cyprus isn’t England, especially the rapidly-changing England of the past decade. It’s small, unlikely to be overrun with nanotechnologists anytime soon; people are set in their ways. English School graduates tend to end up in the Civil Service, or their dads’ companies, or jobs kindly provided by other English School graduates.
Deborah (I suspect) has her work cut out if she truly wants to change the mindset – but there’s one thing we haven’t mentioned, a missing part of the puzzle, which is that Deborah Duncan is a person of faith. Like Tony Blair (but unlike most of her countrymen), she’s a practising Christian, not just providing her with “strong values about how humans should treat each other” – “Love thy neighbour” is the crux of her personal ethos – but also, perhaps, giving her the strength to imagine the impossible. She believes in leadership as well as management, inspiring as well as organising. She likes to read biographies of famous leaders (she claims to have used Rudy Giuliani’s ideas on managing New York – especially perhaps ‘zero tolerance’ – to help in managing her schools), and knows it takes more than five-year plans to effect change: “What you have to do is win hearts and minds of people, and get them to follow you because they want to follow you.” If anyone can shake things up, she can.
Meanwhile she’s enjoying herself, happy to be in a new place, not missing the rain or hellish motorway traffic – though she does miss British TV – glad of the chance to spend more time with her family (school goes on till mid-afternoon in England, followed by hours of meetings then the long drive home). The ‘headmaster’s house’ has been refurbished, albeit not renamed; Deborah’s basking in the late-summer warmth. The challenge starts here – but she sounds quietly confident.
“It’s quite a strong brand,” she explains of the English School, settling back into corporate-speak. “Although there are colonial overtones to the name, which I don’t like, it’s a corporate brand… What we have to do is re-launch the brand, a bit like Lucozade. Lucozade used to be for people who were poorly – in the 1970s and 80s when I was a child, you just bought it if you were ill [and] it was really quite boring. And then they re-launched Lucozade as a sporty drink, etc.
“So that’s an example – and the English School is a really strong brand, with a lot of very good things like you’ve already said: academic excellence, an ethos of pastoral care, an ethos of achievement. But there are elements of it that have to change. And that’s why I’m here.” Best of luck, Mrs. Duncan.
