Rebecca Boomer-Clark, currently the chief executive of one of the country’s biggest multi-academy trusts - Academies Enterprise Trust - has been at the forefront of the academies movement for most of her career.

She became one of the youngest principals in the country at a pioneering early academy in the 2000s and has been a regional schools commissioner, as well as having stints working with some of the biggest MATs.

She tells Tes about the privilege of turning around schools in disadvantaged communities and explains why she is concerned that the education system is becoming too polarised.

1. Who was your most memorable teacher and why?

I was in Year 8 and our class had a new teacher. On her first day, she swept into the room in what became a trademark flamboyant style, picked up some chalk and wrote “Mrs Trewellard” on the blackboard in really large, flourishing letters, and then just sat there and stared at us. My friend and I think that she spent only about 10 minutes staring at us in silence but, aged 12, it felt like an entire hour. We were just shocked into submission; this noisy class was actually momentarily transformed.

Juliet Trewellard was an English and theatre studies teacher - a brilliant teacher, actually - whom I came to know and love … and I’ll never forget her entrance. It remains the best introduction I’ve ever seen by a new teacher.

2. What were the best and worst things about your time at school?

I went to a boarding school. I could say, flippantly, midnight feasts and summer holidays, but that sounds a bit too Enid Blyton. My dad was in the Navy. By the age of 8, I had been to three different schools, as we moved from Portsmouth to Plymouth. My childhood was just fabulous and my childhood and my schooling were completely interwoven.

The worst thing is possibly the fact that my relative lack of interest in maths was indulged rather than challenged.

3. Why do you work in education now?

I’m a fourth-generation teacher. My mum was a teacher for 40-odd years, and my grandfather and my great-grandfather [were both teachers]. So it’s in my genes.

From the moment that I seriously started to think about what I wanted to do, I wanted to work in education. I was really privileged to receive the education that I did. And I just believe it should be the great enabler in all children’s lives.

4. What are you proudest of in your career and what do you regret?

Definitely my first headship at what is now Oasis Academy John Williams, and what was then Oasis Academy, Bristol. It was 2008, I was really young and inexperienced. I joined as a deputy head. When I went for my interview, I very nearly walked away because I’d never seen a school so challenging and so broken. I genuinely didn’t know whether I could be good enough to have the impact that those children needed.

Very sadly, the founding principal, John Williams, died of a heart attack in January 2009 and I was asked to become principal. So I found myself in a really challenging school serving a community that had been failed by education - and actually by society - for many generations. The opportunity to reinvigorate a school, to regain the trust and confidence of a community who were fiercely proud, brilliant people, but who had been seriously let down, was not just an enormous responsibility but a huge privilege.

In terms of regrets, at John Williams, when John was still alive, I remember having conversations in the first term where we were asked whether we were making it any better and there were days we definitely thought it was getting worse. It was a time when you saw the proliferation of silver bullets, radical ideas, thematic curricula when actually what was needed was to focus on getting the basics right. This regret has turned into a really powerful formative learning experience.

5. Who would be in your perfect staffroom?

Wouldn’t it be cool if we could get all four generations of my family together and I could actually have a conversation as an adult with my great-grandfather, my grandfather and my mother?

But I’d also want a staffroom in which we could have healthy debate. We are becoming increasingly tribal in education and polarised by competing ideologies, but the truth always lies somewhere between the two.

So I would have Julie Jackson, president of Uncommon Schools - an incredible educator from the US who, every time I hear her speak, teaches me more about diversity than anybody else.

The second would be Roy Blatchford [founder of blinks.education and a former schools inspector]. He has been really influential for me, in encouraging my natural tendency to be ambitious and imaginative.

The third would be Moira Marder, who is the CEO of the Ted Wragg Multi-Academy Trust now, but we crossed paths as assistant principals in Exeter.

The next is a little known name, but she is a genius when it comes to teaching and learning - Johanna Klinsky. She’s the head of teacher development at Ark Schools. Nobody knows more and is more passionate about developing teachers than her.

Next would be Ben Parnell [director of secondary education at Greenshaw Learning Trust]. Ben and I were trainees together. I’ve always been seriously impressed by the impact he’s had in successive schools in different contexts.

Also Lorraine Heath, who is at one of the best schools in the South West, Uffculme School. She was the head and is now the CEO of a small MAT but always closely connected to what matters in teaching.

6. What would you say are the best and worst aspects of our schools system today?

The best thing is that no matter which school you go into, no matter how it is performing or what judgement it has above its door, there are pockets of brilliance and real expertise that shine brightly, which can be shared and built upon.

I also think that diversity and difference between schools and the fact that our schools are so intrinsic to their local community and context is something we should never lose.

However, sometimes this diversity can lead to a tendency to become more tribal, to become more entrenched. Instead of seeing diversity and distinctiveness as a real strength of our system, we’ve become too focused on being right rather than exploring the richness in our differences and really seeking to learn from others.

7. Your own teachers aside, who in education has influenced you the most?

Lucy Heller, who’s the chief executive of Ark, who I had the real privilege to work with. She sets a new standard in terms of my expectations and ambition for young people. Roy Blatchford, who is always exacting and demanding and colourful and focuses high expectations on what it is that we need to do differently in the classroom.

An academic from the US called Tony Bryk, who is really interesting on how you can move a whole system further and faster.

And then finally, Deborah Eyre, the founder of High Performance Learning, whose research around high expectations on how we can actually enable all young people to fulfil potential is great because it’s pragmatic and is grounded in things that teachers can do differently in classrooms.

8. If you became education secretary tomorrow, what would be the first thing that you’d do?

Firstly, I’d negotiate with HM Treasury to secure the funding that we need in order to be serious about tackling education. The biggest mistake for our generation will be to underestimate both the challenge of education recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and the resources that are needed to address it properly.

Secondly, I would visit lots of schools to listen to people. I would ask all of my new special advisers to come up with a long list of the schools that I should visit and then I wouldn’t go to any of them - I’d go to any other school anywhere else in the country so that I could get a fresh perspective.

9. What will our schools be like in 30 years’ time?

If you look back 30 years, you might expect that 30 years into the future it will not be very different from today - unless we really do seize the current opportunity.

There has never been a more exciting time to be in education. We have a unique opportunity through the galvanising force of the pandemic and that shared experience to think about how we could do some things differently.

I hope that it doesn’t look altogether different because I think there’s a lot that actually will stand the test of time - the primacy of the relationship between teachers and the children they teach, the importance of schools being at the heart of their local communities. I’d like to hope, though, that we will be much more joined-up and more imaginative in the way that specialist services work together.

10. Who has made the biggest difference to education in the past 12 months?

Leora Cruddas [chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts]. I think that she’s been just incredible. First in terms of speaking sense to power and being a strong, pragmatic advocate for the profession and for the sector. But she has also just been a huge support to many of us as leaders personally, and I think she has galvanised what can sometimes be a disparate group of leaders into a powerful force for good.

Rebecca Boomer-Clark was speaking to John Roberts, senior reporter at Tes

This article originally appeared in the 19 November 2021 issue