It’s alright for some - my journey to Headship

As a child I wanted to have blond hair, blue eyes and be called Anne.

It's not surprising, and let me tell you why.

Growing up in the '60s in Uganda, I remember sitting in the back of my Dad's Cortina and driving past a leisure club. It was tantalising: a crystal clear blue swimming pool and red clay courts fringed with verdant green hedges. It piqued my interest - the only 'swimming pool' I'd ever been in was in a small creek where the locals went in first to look for crocodiles. I hassled my Dad to take me there.

"We can't", he told me soberly, "there's a colour bar".

At the tender age of 4, I had my first life lesson; to get the good stuff, you had to be white.

When that madman, Idi Amin, expelled us Asians in 1972, I was excited to arrive as a refugee in London because I thought that being a British citizen would give me the privilege I longed for.

I dreamed of all the wonderful things I'd now be able to do, unaware that places like Leicester were putting out adverts to tell us to stay away because they were 'full'.

The only brown girl in school, I cried every day as I sat, friendless, in the lunch hall while a kindly dinner lady, charged with looking after me, tried to feed me spam fritters. The other children didn't know what to make of me and kept their distance.

I don't blame them; the stories I was telling were of soldiers holding rifles and stealing our money and jewellery at gunpoint. Not really the way to make friends and influence people I guess!

The brutal reality of my 'otherness' was cemented in the '70 and '80s. Growing up in East Ham, at the height of the National Front movement, I paradoxically had lots of friends, many of whom were white. But even then, I knew that I wasn't equal. Nicknames like 'Varn the Staan' reminded me where I came in the pecking order.

In today's educational parlance, I'd be called a disadvantaged child: living in poverty in a multi-occupancy house and caring for my terminally ill mother. This backdrop cemented in my mind an understanding that I would never be good enough to be successful.

By the time I reached adulthood and started teaching, the imposter on my shoulder persuaded me that people like me don't get the top jobs. I'd found what Yamina Bibi calls the 'concrete ceiling'.

I had also learned about the 'motherhood penalty' when my (then) Headteacher told me that she would never promote a mother with a child under five to senior leadership. Odd, because this rule didn't seem to apply to fathers with small children in her team.

But I kept going.

Because of my lived experience, my vocation has always been to remove the very barriers I faced. These children are in our schools right now.

I believe that 'you can't be who you can't see', a phrase I first heard in the seminal work by #WomenEd '10% braver'. It made me realise that, if I didn't go for the very top, then I would be perpetuating the very prejudices that had held me back. Women like me should be aiming high, so that we role model that ambition to our students. When Vivienne Porritt encouraged me to go for Headship, it sealed the deal.

So what have I learnt?

It's important to be aware of intersectionality and how it can affect us. Some of us will have to navigate misogyny, racism, sexism, and, these days, ageism - don't get me started on the menopause.

We can help ourselves and the profession by being curious and aware of these barriers, and deliberately working to remove them.

How?

By checking our privilege, our language and looking beyond just skin colour. Think about class, social identity, gender, disability and be curious. What can conversations with and about these marginalised groups tell us? Use these conversations to think about what can be done to level the playing field and allow us to aim high.

Having made it to Headship (and beyond, but that's another blog), I realise that these life experiences made me strong and resilient, so, instead of using them as reasons to fail, I turned the tables and thought of them as reasons to succeed.

After all, if this little brown girl can make it, so can anyone!

I'm proud to have dark brown hair, eyes and be called Avani!