My son Charlie sat his final A-level paper last week and the significance of this has only just sunk in. It’s not simply that he has finished his schooling; he’s the last of my children to do so. No more PTA meetings, no more parents’ evenings, no more school runs. My kids are all grown up. I’ve fulfilled my biological duty, raising four of them to adulthood, and can now disappear over the horizon into the sunset – or, rather, the Sunset Care Home.
This is particularly poignant as I helped set up the school my children went to. Between 2009 and 2011, I led a small group of parents and volunteers who founded the first free school to sign a funding agreement with Michael Gove, then the education secretary. To this day, I can still picture Boris Johnson, as mayor of London, opening the West London Free School. ‘The Secretary of State has added a new word to the English language,’ he said. ‘We give, they gave, he Gove – he Gove us this school.’
Seeing the school disappear in my rear view mirror is a bittersweet moment
I thought we’d got through the most difficult part at that point, but as the chair of governors I had to deal with a seemingly endlessly series of problems, such as persuading the environmental health officer of Hammersmith and Fulham Council that the building the Department for Education had bought for us was safe to convert into a school. Unexpectedly, my job became managing about half a dozen project managers, each overseeing a different aspect of a £25 million construction project. It was three years before we moved into our permanent home, and in the meantime we had to accommodate 120 new 11-year-olds arriving every September. At one point the pupils were split between two temporary sites and I had to line up a third in case the phased delivery of the main site was delayed. I felt like an air traffic controller having to deal with too many planes circling Heathrow, all of them running out of fuel.
