My friend and mentor Joan Gregory, who has died aged 91, was a remarkable headteacher. She was outstanding because she possessed strength and clarity of vision, which permeated throughout the schools she led.
Joan would stride across the campus greeting everyone she encountered. For her, schools were “places for growing people” and, believing it is in the nature of adolescents to make mistakes, should be “full of second chances”. The bottom line for Joan when it came to potential school changes was “what’s in it for the kids?”
The elder of the two children of Bertram Gregory, a chauffeur, and his wife, Bertha (nee Kemp), Joan was born and brought up in Dorking, Surrey. She attended Guildford County school for girls, where she won a scholarship to Homerton College, Cambridge, to train as a teacher of divinity and history. She then taught in Surrey and Dorset.
In 1960, at the age of 34, she was appointed head of Broomfield school, Havant, from a shortlist that otherwise consisted of six headteachers. The chair of the appointing panel remarked that “in 20 years of interviewing candidates for headships, I have never been so impressed”.
In 1965 she took a three year secondment to the Schools Council, then an important independent body advising the government on education, and in 1968 Joan was appointed head of the new Wakeford School on the Leigh Park estate in Havant.
In 1978, she became principal of Burleigh Community college in Loughborough, an upper school of 1,800 14-18 year old students, virtually the entire adolescent population of the town. She remained there until 1986, when she went to York University for a year as director of the Centre for the Study of Comprehensive Schools. She retired in 1987.
Sometimes outrageous and occasionally cantankerous, Joan had a huge capacity for love and loyalty. She was devoted to her friends and passionate in her interests, including music, antiques, travel, gardening and fast cars. She was an enthusiastic and active member of the Leicester branch of Soroptimist International.
She was a magistrate in Havant and then in Loughborough for many years, retiring in 1996.
Joan’s closest friend and companion, June Herbert, died in January last year.
