A teacher’s quest

Aged 27, Mouhssin Ismail gave up a lucrative career as a City lawyer to “give something back”. Eleven years on, he is head of a sixth-form college in Newham that sent 190 of its 200 pupils to Russell Group universities this year, says Helen Rumbelow in The Times. Like most of his pupils, Ismail comes from a poor immigrant family. He puts his own success down to two things: luck and cricket. Playing semi-professionally ally from his teens, he was exposed to a world rld of privilege that the children he grew up with never saw. The effect was like a finishing school: it taught him to carry himself. Now, he tries to do the same for his pupils, who are as hardworking and clever as any privately educated children – but they lack some key attributes. One is breadth of knowledge. “If you ask them about biology they can be brilliant,” he says. “If you ask them about art or philosophy they can be quite limited.” Another is confidence: he must teach teenagers who have rarely left Newham (where the majority of people look like them) so might not feel comfortable moving through an unfamiliar, largely white world. It’s not always easy, but they do have one advantage over middle-class applicants: resilience born through poverty. “We had a girl say, ‘I can’t hand my homework in, I’m being evicted tomorrow, but I’ll hand it in the next day’. Your family is being kicked out of the house, and you have A-levels in a couple of weeks. Yet they persevere. They inspire me.”