Pioneer teachers aid children fleeing war
A Bath teacher and her wife are working in Eastern Europe to support a new, inclusive school and welcome Ukrainian refugee children.
Florence Symington-maar, 38, from Fairfield Road, Camden, attended Walcott Infants, St Saviour’s Junior School and Ralph Allen Comprehensive School in Coombe Down.
“I am so lucky to have grown up in Bath where I had excellent teachers, wonderful friends, family and neighbours, a vivid cultural and sporting scene and many, many people around me who helped me get a good start in life,” she said.
Flo decided to be a teacher and joined Teach First, a charity that aims to address educational disadvantage. It takes on graduates on a two-year training programme.
Soon Flo was head of science at an inner city school, and when she interviewed science teachers for the same school, Flo recruited the woman who was to become her wife, Slovak Anna Maarova. Anna and Flo got married in Bath’s Guildhall, where Anna received her British citizenship.
The two teachers travelled the world together, working with challenging schools in deprived regions, giving school improvement coaching, teacher training and policy work.
The pair ended up in Slovakia, where they joined ‘Teach for Slovakia’ - the Slovak branch of Teach First.
The country has a 10 per cent Roma population, and schools in the east are highly racially segregated. Teach for Slovakia is working with schools across the country to improve the quality of education.
The organisation helps those schools become more inclusive for students with different special educational needs, different ethnicities, different home languages - and now a growing number of refugee students from Ukraine.
“It is soul destroying watching the disadvantages which some children face and almost completely block them from the chance of being successful in life,” said Flo.
“Segregation, poorly functioning schools and low expectations of society or teachers can ruin the chances a child has.”
Now Anna, with Flo’s support, has gone one step further. She started up a new and pioneering nursery school in the capital Bratislava, which focuses on inclusivity.
From 100 applicantsl, Anna and her colleagues selected 18 children of representative ages and backgrounds to join Rozmanita School’s first intake.
“We are passionate about improving education for all children,” said Flo.
“The children come from Hungary, Germany, Belarus, America and the UK, and the couple’s five-year-old son Daniel is also enrolled.
This week four children from Ukraine also joined Anna’s school.
In the last two weeks, more than 200,000 refugees from Ukraine including thousands of children have arrived in Slovakia.
The country has very little experience of helping refugees and is trying to respond the best it can.
Rozmanita was one of the first schools to respond by creating extra places to welcome children from Ukraine.
It has since set up an internet platform to help families find schools for their children, as this was very difficult for them with no central system or local government responding quickly enough.
To support their school visit: https://bit.ly/3i52gp2.