Patience, Precision, and Progress: Lessons from the Workshop | Thetford Academy

Thetford Academy Principal Michael Fordham reflects on his time jumping in as a woodwork teacher, and how patience, precision and hands-on creativity can teach lessons far beyond the workshop.

Although I am a history teacher by training, the reality of being a headteacher is that you sometimes need to teach any subject where there is a gap on the timetable, and so it was that last academic year I ended up as a woodwork teacher. And it was an enormous amount of fun: over the course of a year, I worked with four classes of Year 9 students, all of whom built a wooden box, complete with hand-cut box joints on each corner.

I shall admit that I was not a complete novice. Back during those warm lockdown evenings of spring 2020, I returned to woodwork. It was an interest I had at school and I had pencilled it in as a retirement project, but one thing the pandemic did was make us all think about our lives and many of us took up new hobbies. Five years later, and I am still going.

In our modern day of instant gratification, there is something humbling about spending several hours working with a piece of oak: patience and precision are the name of the game. My early dovetail joints were rubbish, and it was necessary to practise, make mistakes and keep going when you’ve made your umpteenth error. The same is true of all the subjects we teach in school, but there is something very visible and tangible about the painful journey of progress when working with a material such as wood.

This is why I am so excited that woodwork has had a bit of a renaissance at Thetford Academy this last year. The Art & Design team have thrown themselves into the challenge, we’ve invested in some new kit, and some of our students are digging out old planes that were probably used at Rosemary Musker in the 1980s. I’m very much looking forward to seeing what they do with them!

Editor’s note: Congratulations to Laura Hodges, Classic FM Secondary School Music Teacher of the Year. The judges said of Laura, “The progress Laura has made at the school and for the students is remarkable. Music is part of the school day, giving students confidence and skills they never thought they’d have.”