‘This wasn’t meant to be a story of despair’
Headteacher Angie Browne is used to making some tough calls – then it was captured on TV. Luke Mintz reports
It’s 10.30am and Angie Browne is already on her fourth coffee of the day. We meet on a drizzly Monday morning at her school office on the outskirts of Bristol. The classrooms are eerily quiet due to a school inset day, giving Browne – who spends most of her free time ferrying around her four-year-old son – respite from the hectic school day.
Her workload will be familiar to anyone who tuned in to the first episode of BBC Two’s School documentary last Tuesday; the compelling six-part series which follows life inside three schools, including The Castle, an academy in Thornbury, Gloucestershire, during the year when Browne was interim head teacher. “Despite the fact many of the buildings seem to be falling apart, it’s in a really lovely rural setting,” she says. “This film was an opportunity to say: ‘This is what it’s like in schools at the moment’.”
Fly-on-the-wall school programmes have proved popular. The Educating series – which, since 2011, has focused on schools in Essex, Yorkshire, the East End, Cardiff and Greater Manchester – attracted a loyal audience, and prompted much soul-searching about the state of British education. Browne knows that teachers featured in these programmes often attract attention. Drew Povey became something of a celebrity after appearing on Educating Greater Manchester last year, later prompting headlines with his resignation. Browne, who hasn’t been on TV since the age of six when she appeared in an episode of Why Don’t You?, is worried she might not live up to the hype.
“I know these programmes, and the protagonists are probably a little more heroic than I’ll be depicted,” she says. “So I’m a bit nervous about that.”
Browne has had an impressive career. Starting out as an English teacher in inner-city Bristol, she later ran a tough pupil referral unit that catered for students who had been kicked out of other schools. Next, she became the first head teacher of a Steiner school, the freedom-loving school brand popular with middleclass parents who are keen to escape the strictures of mainstream education. Then, last year, she was thrown into the deep end when she took the post of interim head teacher at The Castle, just as it was being forced to make £300,000 worth of budget cuts.
When told that a BBC documentary would record the first year of her new job, Browne was hesitant. Other teachers worried that children would go “wild with excitement” when they saw TV cameras. She was persuaded that School, which focuses on Castle’s cuts to staff pay and special needs budgets, would help to highlight the financial plight of state schools across the country – with spending per pupil predicted to fall by 6.5 per cent by 2020, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
“I’m not sure the public is aware of how difficult it has become. It felt like an opportunity to give voice to some of the complexities that schools are dealing with. But it was nerve-racking. We do a lot of coping and making things [look] better than they possibly are, because we don’t want to let people know that things are not OK, because you’re responsible for people’s children. A lot of our job is to say: ‘It’s fine, we’ve got this,’ so it was daunting letting people see the moments when things are not fine.”
Browne is particularly anxious about becoming the face of school cuts, and she’s been advised by producers to keep off social media. During a tense scene in the first episode, Browne had to announce £6,000 pay cuts to a room of teachers. “It was really, really hard, and now it’s preserved in screen history. I do look back on those moments and think: ‘Was I as human as I possibly could be?’ And I think I was.” She admits there are some moments in the documentary at which she cringes, but says she’s glad it’s all out in the open. “That’s just my ego and fear of criticism getting in the way. The point was to make a series about what is really happening in schools.”
Browne is used to a challenge. She’s always believed that children spend too much time indoors in classrooms, and fail to engage the practical parts of their brain. The philosophy of Rudolf Steiner appealed to her, and when a group of parents founded a Steiner free school in 2014 in Fishponds, Bristol, she jumped at the opportunity to get involved.
Under her leadership, the school – now attended by her son, Arthur – taught woodwork and craftwork, and put as much emphasis on art, music and drama as they did on maths, English and science. Children took regular trips to local parks and learnt outdoor craft activities. Her love of the outdoors probably came from her parents, she says, who moved from north London to the edge of Dartmoor, Devon, when she was 10.
One scene in the documentary shows Browne chatting with Year 7 pupil Chelsea, who is one of few black students in the school, and has encountered comments from other pupils such as “your nose looks squished into your face”. Browne, who was the only black pupil in her Dartmoor secondary school, remembers similar treatment.
“The conversation I had with Chelsea has particular resonance because I knew exactly what she was talking about. On my first day [of secondary school], at lunchtime, I remember some Year 11 boys saying: ‘Pull that trigger, shoot that n-----’. I’d never heard that before. The more pervasive stuff was always being the only black person in a room. It’s always thinking: ‘I’m going to walk in and they’re not going to be expecting me to be black, and everyone’s going to do that face, and I’m going to have to make everything OK because they’re going to feel bad for looking shocked.’ That was the stuff that made you feel like you stood out.”
The documentary also looks at the rising tide of children affected by mental health issues. In one episode, Year 11 student Chloe is too afraid even to enter an exam hall to sit her mock GCSES. Browne places much of the blame at the feet of smartphones and social media companies, which keep children “continually connected” to their peers. “There’s no down time, no solitude, no time to rebuild and restore yourself. Lots of children are subjected to a constant scrutiny of others, and are finding it difficult to formulate their own sense of self.”
Browne finds her own solitude in reading and cooking, winding down after putting Arthur to bed by lighting a fire and watching television; Jamie Cooks Italy and The Great British Bake Off are particular favourites. She’ll try not to obsess too much over how she comes across on television, but hopes it’s not all doom and gloom.
“It wasn’t meant to be a story of despair, because actually all of us are still there. There is a funding issue for sure, but there are also so many situations that are brilliant and uplifting – that conversation with Chelsea is just one. That’s why I still want to work in education.”
‘It was daunting letting people see the moments when things are not fine’