What do you do when you’ve topped your career by winning a lifetime achievement award?  Tony Maxwell, national winner in 2003 of the Teaching Award’s Award for Lifetime Achievement returned to roots he first laid down in the ’60s, when he sang and played guitar and harmonica in Manchester as a member of the band The Sink.  Following his retirement from 37 years at St Michael’s RC Secondary School, Stockton-on-Tees, including eight years as Head Teacher, Tony took up the opportunity to appear at the Hartlepool Jazz Club and responded to requests for a CD of his music by recording a disc with the Jeremy McMurray Quartet.  His decision to contribute any profits to the Help for Heroes charity reflects the spirit of public service which is so often seen amongst Teaching Awards winners.

Tony gives a brief plug to this project at the beginning of the Teaching Awards’ national judges meeting, before we begin the business of the day.  Today’s meeting is the culmination of the 2010 judging process.  Judges have read thousands of nominations and visited schools across the country to determine the regional winners for 2010 and awards ceremonies have been held in each of the country’s seven regions.  Judges at national level have selected their winners from the region’s winners and we are ready to share our decisions with our colleagues on the judging panel.  The winners will, of course, be announced at the national awards ceremony at the end of October.

The panel meeting is unlike meetings I have attended elsewhere in my life.  The focus is on the many aspects of regional winners’ contribution that were celebrated at regional level and it’s clear that the national judging teams have struggled at times to place the metaphorical cigarette paper between regional finalists to decide on the national winner.  I experience a rush of fellow feeling when one of my colleagues on the panel shares how he “blubs so much more easily” now that he is older and another colleague describes a moment on one visit when she was moved to tears.  As the meeting progresses the sense of celebration builds around the room and I find myself wondering, as I leave the meeeting, how would life be different if it were in our wider culture to look for the things that are working and celebrate them as we have been doing here today?

I am aware that the Teaching Awards is offering an opportunity for celebration and, in this way, opening up possibilities for a shift both in our culture in schools and in our wider culture.  As Tony Maxwell says about the music he has chosen to record on his CD:  “The world is there to be changed and there is no age barrier to being involved in that process”.

I look forward to seeing you at the Awards ceremony in October.