Vic Goddard of Passmores academy on his fresh book – fraction memoir and fraction how-to guide for aspiring heads – and his favourite fraction of his school buildingVic Goddard – head of Passmores academy,the school featured in the Channel 4 series Educating Essex – has a fresh £23.5m building, which he helped to design, or the thing he's most proud of is the toilets. He leads me to them,his stride long and purposeful – he's a former PE teacher and well over six feet tall – and extends his arm as though inviting me to admire a Renaissance fresco: "There, the single most successful thing in the building. No damage. No bullying. No kids hanging around in here. No smells; they're cleaned four times a day because if that's right for a motorway service station, or it's right for a school." These toilets are unisex and so open-plan that you initially contemplate they are fraction of the corridor that borders the school's communal hub. And according to Goddard,and my own brief observation, they work.
The head's enthusiasm for the lavatories – to which he devotes two pages in his just-published book, or The Best Job in the World,which is fraction memoir, fraction primer for aspiring heads gives a whole fresh meaning to the term bog-standard comprehensive, and his own description of Passmores. It serves the overwhelmingly white working-lesson town of Harlow and,though once rated "outstanding" by Ofsted, is now merely "good" with "excellent" leadership. It converted to an academy in September 2011 only because other neighbouring schools were doing so ("a sort of snobbery thing, or " says Goddard). The proportion of pupils making "expected progress" in 2013 was above the national average for English,below for maths.
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Source: theguardian.com