Helen Wilkinson - Head of English

When did you realise teaching was the path for you?

I first wanted to be a teacher when I was nine. Mr. McKnight’s class. He was creative. He was funny. He had this way of making everything seem important, and of making everybody feel important. You wanted to be in his class. You needed to be there. And for a nine-year-old, that’s the kind of thing you latch onto. I knew it at the time: I wanted to be like that guy. I wanted to make people want to be in my class. To make it matter.

Then came Year 10 English. I'd always loved to read, but I wasn’t engaged. The work was checklist of nonsense. I was drowning in it.

That all changed when Mrs Cummings joined the school as Head of English and became my teacher. She was a force of nature. The way she taught wasn’t about what you learned—it was about what you felt. I remember one lesson, exploring Juliet's relationship with her father, and she challenged me to do something out of my comfort zone. I played Juliet and the rest of the class stood in a circle around me, playing my father. No matter how much I pleaded, they turned their backs on me, and I understood Juliet's desperate isolation. Can you imagine trying to get a teenage girl to do that? It was magic. I hung on her every word and read everything she recommended.

Did Mrs Cummings inspire you to teach?

I remember once telling Mrs Cummings at a parents' evening that I wanted to do her job one day. Now, I'm Head of English at Biddick Academy, and, by a twist of fate, this was the school she'd come from when she joined the school I went to.

I'm fortunate to have been able to let her know what an inspiration she was, 20 years later. What a thing to be able to do.

I'm more than a teacher...

I'm a bridge—between the lessons of the past and the potential of the future, trying to pass the magic on to the next custodian.

When you become a teacher, it becomes part of who you are. It's an integral part of your identity because it's such an emotive thing. You reach a tipping point where you're not the young blood anymore, and you're showing someone else the ropes. And you know, one day, they'll pass that on to their trainees, and you'll probably come up in some anecdote or other. I've heard people say that teaching is an echo chamber, but what a wonderful echo we get to be part of.

Tell us about a funny interaction you have had with a pupil/pupils

We have posters on our classroom doors about the jobs we did before teaching, and one of mine says 'singer'. The kids ask about it, and I tell them I have two albums on Spotify, but I'll never tell them the name of the band I was in and none of them have ever managed to find out. Recently, I'd gone to my best friend's house for a cuppa and a catch up, and she told me she had a former student of mine on her foundation degree course, and my name had come up. Mid conversation, the kid asks her "What was the name of her band, again?" Et voila. She'd held onto that question for six years. I couldn't help but laugh.

Tell us about a moment when you felt you had made a difference

I have two that stand out. A few years ago, I took about 40 Key Stage 4 students on a writers' retreat in the Lake District. We did a mixture of revision sessions, writing workshops with professional writers and adventurous activities. Outside of school, I write poetry professionally and run a spoken word night. On the last night, after a spoken word workshop with an amazing poet called Jess Green, we sat around a campfire and students stood up to read their poems. The work they read out was phenomenal: it was brave and vulnerable and, frankly, astoundingly good. You could hear a pin drop. I'll never forget that night.

On another occasion, I was walking through town and a young man came up to me and asked if I was Miss Wilkinson. You know they're a former student, and you're trying to place them among the hundreds or even thousands you've taught. When he said his name, I placed him immediately. We'd once had a conversation after a lesson where he hadn't done his work and he'd confessed that at 13 he couldn't read well enough to do it. After that, we'd read the class reader together in lunchtimes, taking a page each. I'm not saying I taught him to read, but he'd connected that with him reading to his little boy, and he said thank you. I'm not sure I'll ever have a better outcome than that.