‘I realised at a very young age that no one was going to save me’

Danielle Lewis-Egonu is CEO of Cygnus Academies Trust. She was formerly a headteacher, senior leader and early years teacher. She writes:

I realised at a very young age that no one was going to save me. But at the age of 6, I made a decision to believe that the world was fundamentally a good place - it just had some bad people in it.

I lived in extreme poverty. There was limited access to food, so I was extremely malnourished. I wasn’t safe a lot of the time. I barely went to school at all. The cracks in the system are built into the system because it is run by people who do not understand what it is like to be in those situations, so they simplify very complex challenges. I feel a responsibility because of my experience to change that, but not to “rescue” people. I absolutely believe in helping, but not in a way that removes people’s agency or positions change as something done to them. For me, change only sticks when people are active participants in their own lives.

My mum is illiterate. I might never have learned to read either, but there was a brief period when I was younger when I was in school and a teacher returned from maternity leave. She would sit with her baby tucked under one arm, feeding him pieces of cheese, while teaching me to read. Because of that brief window, I did become a reader, though even now I still find reading difficult. That’s why I am so passionate about reading in our schools: it unlocks everything.

I was in the care system by the time I took my GCSEs. I would guess I had been in school less than 30 per cent of the time. They rang my sister and asked her to bring me in to sit the exams. Somehow I passed, I went to college, but it was so tough being a teenager in care that I dropped out after a year. I eventually managed to finish my studies, got into university. I made it through. There was no help. I was stumbling along. This is why it is so important that the system supports young people like I used to be right through to 25 years of age - we lose so many because we don’t have the right structures in place.

Nobody at the schools where I was registered knew I was in care. That’s incredible really, isn’t it? That’s why I am so supportive of how Ofsted is looking at this issue. The system has not moved on enough since I was a child. Schools should not just know a child is in care but the quality of that care and, as far as possible, the circumstances of that child being in care. Not to label the child, but to understand the vulnerabilities of that child and to uncover those children not necessarily on a school’s radar already.

The world told me who I was from a very young age. It told me I shouldn’t be a brown child with a white mum. It told me I didn’t belong. It told me I wasn’t black enough, I wasn’t Irish enough. So I had to find my own sense of culture and self from a very young age and be OK with that. That’s shaped the person I am today, and the type of leader I have become.

I have always wanted to work in areas of high deprivation and vulnerability. I have sought those schools out as a teacher, as a headteacher and then as a CEO. I want to be in those settings that are at their lowest, and I want to be part of turning them around and creating a better outcome for those children by designing better systems.

Structure is important. The few times I was actually in school, my behaviour was not good. I was feral, really. The teachers needed to be tough with me. I needed to be excluded. I needed boundaries. We can’t get into the trap of believing that because a child has had a tough life, we can give them a watered-down version of education - they need the very best education because they are going to need more help than any other child.

I believe hope is not passive. It’s a tangible thing that you have to work at. So I have always made the choice to go into a place and start from a positive, not a negative. Nobody comes into teaching to do a bad job. And if you start from a positive place, then it’s a very different experience for everyone in that school. Because though you have your checks and balances, you challenge people, you push them - it all comes from building off glimmers of hope. You can’t go in with a hammer, you have to build from where the positive energy is.

I grew up with no social construct, there were no real rules, there were no boundaries, there was no expectation. It was just survival. So when your schema, your sense of the world, is that, you spend a lot of time observing from this sort of neutral standpoint. And what I recognised is that there are no absolutes. That’s incredibly useful to leadership because it means I am not making ideological decisions that are deeply ingrained in me. I am reacting to what is in front of me and what I am learning.

People are always trying to find ways to package practice, to make tricky things easier for people, to create a playbook. But that’s just avoiding the fact that to get things right we need to put a lot of energy into them, that it takes a lot of commitment. And sometimes we can’t - or don’t want to - put that energy in. So we use a playbook - and obviously it doesn’t work.

I’m very relational by nature, and most of the influence in my life came from people who noticed something, built connection and stayed. That’s fundamentally how I lead now. I’m not someone who seeks the spotlight; I lead through trust, relationships and creating the conditions for others to thrive.

People get too caught up in an idealistic vision of success. For me, it’s not about bells and whistles - it is about quality teaching and having holistic opportunities. Every child deserves those things.

Being early years-trained has been the best preparation for leadership. The whole ethos of early years is about being holistic, seeing the family and the children and the system in interaction. You cannot see education in isolation in early years teaching; it has to be rooted in all the elements that make us human. We seem to move further and further away from that as children get older.

I ask lots of questions. I’m very curious. I want to know the detail. I think that can be frustrating for people, but it’s just me trying to understand and when I understand, I’ll leave you to it and support you. I say to our heads, “This is your school, not mine. You make the decisions. I just want to understand those decisions.”

So many problems can be solved by having an honest conversation. But people are scared of honest conversations in case they upset parents or upset teachers or upset others. I am OK with conflict, I think it is a natural part of life. I don’t like it - nobody likes it - but it’s healthy as long as it is honest and sensible, and people listen and learn. If everyone’s shouting and angry, then no, clearly it isn’t a going to be a good thing. But good leadership is about ensuring that conflict does not get to that point.

I wouldn’t change my life. I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve been really fortunate to work in tough, challenging situations, and to be able to do that with a perspective of having come from a tough, challenging background. But this is not something I have felt compelled to do. I chose to do this job. And the joy is in that choice.

I obviously want to help all the children everywhere. But the reality is, it’s not possible. The reality is that it’s OK to help the children that are in your closest vicinity, and that’s enough. That’s more than enough. It’s OK even if it is just one child you can change the trajectory for. I feel the impact of one kid as much as if it were 10.

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