Interviews
- News Archive
Bev Wight, Senior Lecturer, reviews her time at St Mary’s
How long have you been working here?
I started at St Mary’s as a part time lecturer in 1991, when I came here to work on the Masters in ICT course in Education. I did that for two years, but then I got a job in Croydon, so I moved away.
There was always going to be another job available at St Mary’s at some point though, so I kept looking at the papers and seven years later the job came up. I applied for it and got it, and thought I was going to disappear quietly into retirement.
But as it happens, I think I’ve done more curriculum development since I’ve been here than in the previous thirty years of my career.
It sounds like you’ve done a lot during your time here.
Yes, it’s been very interesting. I started off on the Primary ICT course and was supporting the Secondary course. Then, when we got the chance to do the Church Colleges Foundation degree, I was asked to take control of that. So I took control, not realising quite how much work I’d taken on.
But that’s been one of the most rewarding aspects of my career, because I’ve been working with women who’ve had a second chance – women who’ve had a dream, but because of family circumstances or personal reasons have been unable to get what they wanted first time around. It’s been amazing working with those kinds of women, and helping them get their degrees and achieve their dreams of becoming qualified teachers.
What was your background before you joined St Mary’s?
I trained as a Business Studies teacher, and then I was a teacher for twenty-nine years in secondary schools in South East London. Education Secretary Kenneth Baker decided there was going to be a computer in every school, and I was the only one free in the classroom when the computer arrived. And that’s how I got into computers, and subsequently moved across into Computer Studies and Computer Science.
What have been the highlights of your time here?
The first cohort that graduated with the foundation degree, that was an amazing experience seeing those women go through, because they’d had such a bad time
beforehand, personally and some of them professionally. Also, I think generally the fourth year of the students’ courses is a highlight.
For the first two years they’re a Classroom Assistant, then the third year they start to do a bit of teaching. By the fourth year they’ve grown up. They stand up tall, their shoulders are back, their heads are higher. They demand respect in the classroom, they demand respect in the staffroom, and they become much stronger people.
One of the students once said to me that she was offered a job in her third year, but she would have had to give the course up. She said that all her life she’d been an intelligent and capable person and she’d been able to gain promotions at work. But every promotion she’d had, she’d had to ‘go through the backdoor.’ With this degree, she said, she was able to ‘walk through the front door’ just like everybody else because she was now equal to everybody else.
That meant everything to her, so even though she was giving up a year on a high salary, she was gaining the kind of equality she deserved, but hadn’t had the opportunity to get.
It’s a typical St Mary’s thing this – giving people a second chance – and very much part of the University College’s ethos of being a caring, sharing place. It’s such a meaningful part of what we do, and I think the Foundation degree is exactly the type of course St Mary’s should be running: preparing people, working with the community and enriching education.
