John Rendel
Studied: PPE, Oxford University
Joined: 2003
Taught: Maths at Sacred Heart School, Camberwell, London
Now: CEO and founder of the charity - Promoting Equality in African Schools (PEAS)
For me Teach First was a great opportunity to do something that I would enjoy, that would be personally challenging and that would enhance rather than restrict my options. I looked at the portfolio of schools and felt that these were the schools where you could have the biggest impact and add the most value.
The six-weeks training is a great start but the vast majority of your training is done in the classroom. You also rely a great deal on the in-school mentor. Mine was fantastic – very supportive, making lots of time for me.
The hardest point for me was when I ran a Saturday detention and two of the boys got into a major fight outside with weapons. But balancing that, there have been a lot of incidents over the two years that have been very funny.
In my role with PEAS I have to provide both leadership and effective management and I think my time with Teach First has helped me enormously in this. I’ve learned about management by consensus and about packaging what you want to achieve for the organisation in a way that appeals to each individual’s own motivation.
The PEAS project has really taken off in the last year and we now have a school of 700 pupils up and running, and are in the land acquisition stage for our second school. I’m also working on a volunteer programme that will enable Teach First participants to spend a third year working as teaching consultants to the PEAS project in Uganda.
Teach First has taught me that if you decide you want to do something and you put your mind to it you can make it work and achieve an incredible amount. You are going to fail a bit and succeed a bit – what you have to do, and what Teach First helps you to do – is to develop the resilience to bounce back every time you fail, and learn from it.
