“Once you get over yourself,” says Matt King, headmaster of Great Ballard School, you can have “the joy of appointing people who are so much better than you.”
And it's that view that permeates his approach to colleagues, students and family – of every type. He is a headteacher who has an open door policy, celebrates fun, encourages brave thinking, even finds himself proud of a pupil protest. His values are legacies from his parents with an extra one on top, and are things he treasures, nurtures and consciously refers to in times of uncertainty.
We spoke about the values that have helped him take some quite radical steps in education of children from ages 2-16, balancing the necessary disciplines of the curriculum with some quite unusual approaches to lifelong learning.