Tuesday 3 April 2018

Rebel Rev goes back to school

When I very first started this blog it was about my experiences as a hospital chaplain in a busy London hospital. To protect the patients and their relatives I wrote anonymously. 

As the years have gone by and I finished my work in the hospital, it became a platform for me to talk about the realities of living with cancer and it’s treatment. 

One of the things I’ve realised is that I’ve never written anything about my many years as a school chaplain. I think I should redress that. 

I have been fortunate to work in two very different schools. One was an all girls school. This was a very established Church of England school and was over subscribed due to OFSTED rating it as outstanding. While I worked there I also looked after a local parish. The parish consisted of a large inner city council estate. This split role job in essence involved me working with three distinct communities. The school, the estate and surrounding community and the church congregation. At times I felt pulled in so many different directions with lots of competing demands. The work was tough and the hours were long. 

I remember when I first arrived feeling very bereft. I had loved my role as a hospital chaplain. I found the lack of structure for the parish side quite difficult initially. I had not built up the relationships yet so spent lots of time wondering what to do next. The school was better and had a rhythm to it. My very first day in the school was an INSET day, in other words a staff training day, so no students. During the headteachers presentation all of a sudden was this heart stopping scream and a member of staff ran from the hall. I followed the commotion and asked if I could help. The headteacher told me it was ok and she would deal with it. 

It turned out that the member of staff had just received a text saying her dad, who was in hospital, had taken a turn for the worst and wasn’t expected to live for very long. 

I hadn’t expected high drama in this way and thought I’d left that behind with the change from hospital to school. In the hospital environment whenever there was a tragedy, the first person to be called was the chaplain.  Schools don’t work like that. They are very hierarchical and also fairly splintered into different departments and levels of seniority. It seemed the head teacher would decide if I had a role to play and I would have to wait to be invited in. This was really foreign to me and took some getting used to. 

As it turned out the man who was ill survived a little while longer. During this time I built up a relationship with the member of staff and the head who happened to be very good friends with the wife of the ill man. I visited the family many times over the next few months and supported them through those awful early days of their bereavement. It seems my time as a hospital chaplain would be useful to school chaplaincy. 

The second school I worked at was a mixed school and was out in Kent. Very different from inner city London. The school had previously been considered by the local authority to be a failing school. As a result it was decided it would have to become an Academy. The sponsor that won the bid to run the Academy was a Christian based group. They had a huge established history of running fee paying schools and had decided to branch out into the State System. 

This particular school hadn’t previously been a school with any sort of Christian ethos. They were after a chaplain who could work with the same kids, staff, parents/carers and governors who hadn’t asked for God to be involved in their education process, to suddenly being classified as a Church school. It was a big ask for them and for me who had been headhunted for the job. 

On the day I went to look around the school, the deputy head got this year 10 boy out of his lesson to talk to me. Apparently he had been very vocal about it not becoming a Christian Academy. I asked this lad what he was worried about and he just shrugged at me. I tried again and said what did he think the problem was and he said “I dunno mam” I tried another tack and asked him if he liked motorbikes. He enthusiastically nodded. I told him my last bike was an SV650 Suzuki. His eyes widened a bit. I then asked him what football team he supported and he told me Man U. I then teased him and said he only liked them because they were a top premiership team. I said if he really wanted to watch some good football he should follow the women’s game because that was played for the love of the sport and not the big bucks of the men’s game that had ruined the sport. I then told him that I had played for Millwall and Charlton. I then tried again to ask him what he was worried about from the school becoming a Christian Community and what was he expecting. As quick as a flash he said “not you” and then we both laughed. From that point on we got on like a house on fire. 


Over lunch the deputy head introduced me to a year 7 student who over the course of the recent half term had witnessed his friend fall in a river and be swept away to his death. I had a bit of a chat with the lad and sowed some seeds in the hope he may talk to me once I formally started. He seemed to be very shut down and closed off about it all. It seemed that school chaplaincy was going to be just as tough as hospital chaplaincy at times. 

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