Rosemary reflects on a life and career dedicated to education

When Rosemary Salisbury was growing up on the outskirts of Omagh in the 1950s and ‘60s, she was routinely reminded that nobody, especially the likes of her, should ever get above their station.

Rural life at that time was, in its own way, intensely classist.

There was an almost feudal belief in the idea that a person’s destiny was predetermined by who they were and where they were from.

With nothing more than your surname and postcode, most people, without claiming the prescience of a prophet, would have fancied their chances at forecasting your future.

There was also a strong emphasis on the necessity of ‘knowing your place’. Indeed, in the unwritten, cultural law of the land, there were few people subjected to the same bitter contempt as those who stood accused of having ‘notions’ about themselves.

But guess who didn’t care about any of that? Rosemary Salisbury – that’s who.

Rosemary was born into a small farming family outside the county town on January 3, 1950.

When she was only 18 months old, her father was killed in a tractor accident.

“It was June 14, 1951 when my mother was left alone to raise me and my three brothers (aged 3, 10 and 11). In those days, there was no insurance, no widow’s pension, no anything.

“So, yes, not a great start,” said Rosemary, with a kind of downplaying irony, when we spoke with her earlier this week.

As well as going onto become the principal of many schools and a kind of supernanny-like figure tasked with whipping underpeforming schools into shape, Rosemary is also a cancer survivor, cognitive behavioural therapist, late blooming gardener, and, if I’m honest, all-round force of nature.

“I have a lot of scary childhood memories,” said Rosemary, when asked to think back to her formative years.

“I can recall hearing my mother say she didn’t know where the next bite was coming from and panicking over how she was going to manage.

“Of course, many families were, by today’s standards, dreadfully poor, but ours was made worse by the death of my father. He had been the sole provider, as was way then,” she reflected.

Rosemary went to a primary school that was presided over by two sisters (not nuns, but siblings), where none of the pupils were given the chance to take the 11-plus.

“We were mostly small farmers’ or labourers’ kids, so they didn’t expect much of us,” said Rosemary sardonically.

A few years later when she started at the Girls’ Secondary Model in Omagh, her teachers would point out the window towards the local shirt factory and remind the class where their destiny lay.

“Most of the teachers assumed we were 11-plus failures and treated us accordingly,” said Rosemary.

But, despite what seemed like almost everyone’s best efforts, they could not crush her ambitions. Rosemary, without making it public, quietly guarded a dream of one day becoming a teacher.

“If people had known what I wanted to do, they’d have told me not to ‘get above myself’. That’s the sort of rubbish people used to say back then,” scorned Rosemary, before relating an absurdly odd anecdoate.

“When word got out that I wanted to be something other than a seamstress, a neighbour used to wait by the roadside almost every day and harangue me about still being at school: ‘What do you think you’re doing, still at school at your age? You should be out working and earning your keep. Who do you think you are? You’ll never be a teacher going to that school’. It was scary at first, but I soon learned to ignore her jibes.

“Strange isn’t it? Life can be like a bucket of crabs: Everyone is happy when you are all scrabbling about at the bottom, but try to climb out and the others do their best to drag you back down,” observed Rosemary.

But Rosemary’s fortunes started to change when she met a teacher who saw something in her.

“Mrs Grant heard me read in assembly and told me I had a ‘lovely wee voice’ and that she’d like to ‘do something with it’. Things started to improve from that point.”

Together the pair toured every Feis and Rosemary proved a formidable adversary for the Loreto Convent’s best.

At 15 , the principal, who Rosemary describes as ‘a bit of a battle-axe’, started to entertain the radical idea that maybe some of her students had a brain.

“When it was announced that some of us could do our O-levels, my friend turned to me and whispered ‘What’s O levels?’, to which I replied, ‘I dunno’.”

But Rosemary soon found out what they were, before taking and passing them.

The years that followed saw Rosemary enrol in a new girls Catholic teacher training college in Nottinghamshire.

“Aptly enough, this holy institution was opened on a road called Knicker Hill. Sure how could I refuse such an offer?” laughed Rosemary.

After three years of fun in Nottingham, Rosemary stepped into the classroom and knew immediately that it is where she belonged.

Rosemary was quickly recognised as having a rare talent for education.

“I managed to get ‘head hunted’ and after a year joined another school, which gave me the strange accolade of being Nottinghamshire’s youngest scale three teacher, at just 22.”

Rosemary then met her husband Bob, got married in August 1975 and had their first son, Matt in August 1976.

“I made the choice to resign from my post then. I was passionate about teaching, but I also wanted to try to be a good parent and didn’t feel I could do both.”

The next ten years saw Rosemary raise Matt and his two brothers, Edward and Howard.

“During that time I did some supply teaching, which was the best training ever.

“Supply teachers in those days were regarded as a couple of rungs below the cleaning staff, so I was able to observe all sorts of things without anyone feeling in any way threatened.

“I seen some excellent and some awful practices, all of which served me well in the future.”

When Rosemary went full time again, she had to start at the bottom.

Soon, though, she got a head of department job, then within four years became deputy head of a large city comprehensive, second largest in Nottingham.

“It was during this time my obsession with teaching and learning began. I learnt so much about school improvement and most of all developed an absolute conviction that it can only be sustained if we focus on what goes on in the classroom. Nothing is more important,” she said.

And it is this ethos that forms the thread that ran through the rest of her career in education, whether she was earning her diploma in school management, helping improve the staying-on rate in an inner city college by 21 per-cent, engaging in her doctorate course, completing her masters degree, serving as principal of one of the largest comprehensive schools in North Nottingham, or giving the Integrated College in Omagh ‘a good shake-up’.

“I was recuperating from breast cancer when I received a letter from Mrs Grant (remember? She of the ‘lovely wee voice’) that included an advertisement for the post of principal of the Integrated College.

“I read it and thought, ‘Maybe cancer is not life threatening, just life changing’.

“Bob and I talked about it and I thought: I’ll give it a go. I’ve been in England for 33 years; maybe it’s time for a change.”

Rosemary postponed her radiotherapy for a week so that she could go for the interview.

“I felt I had nothing, to lose so I decided I’d give them my fairly strong views on education and how I believed a school should be run; what it should offer young people in the 21st century.”

It worked, Rosemary got the job and the family moved home in 2001. And the rest, as they say, is history.

“The school had a few serious problems at that time. The grades were poor and enrolment was falling. However, there were some fabulous teachers and an abundance of fantastic students. Within a few years, with a little direction and attention, we almost doubled the grades and transformed the reputation of the school. I am really proud of that,” said Rosemary.

If you want to hear about how Rosemary came to be appointed by Westminster as a trouble-shooter for struggling schools, turned her retirement into a project to help tackle the child and adolescent mental health crisis, and brought a lump fo her father’s dying land back to life, you’ll have to wait until another day.

But for now, that’s the story of Rosemary Salisbury – and one we would all do well to remember.