Catriona Maclay, Founder, Hackney Pirates

I had a very important experience through doing the Teach First programme… The experience of being in what was a very challenging school — at the time it had the second-lowest GCSE results in London — it was a very challenging place to be in. I had the experience that working with kids is amazing, young people have such a mixture of creativity and fun and joy. Really just being so excited by education, the power and force of education being such a powerful way to have a positive social impact because it’s at such an early stage in people’s lives. In all of our lives there’s such an optimistic hope.

What was particularly frustrating [though] was seeing children fall behind for reasons that aren’t particularly complex, they weren’t necessarily the ones demanding the attention in the classroom.

Lost in the middle there are lots of children where something’s got in their way, maybe a minor learning difficulty, maybe a lack of confidence, something that shouldn’t necessarily be a big deal. In other environments you’d give them extra support and they’d get over that hurdle. It’s just really frustrating. There were just a couple of children in particular that I was thinking ‘what could have supported them, what could have made the
difference to them?’

Hackney Pirates started by accident.

It started very flippantly, let’s do a pilot to see if this model… could work in Hackney.

Catriona Maclay, Founder, Hackney Pirates