__ LIPS – Leading in Public Schools

A graffiti tagged girder frames a reflection of the reality of a bygone line to other places.  Rusting piers, capped by grasses and an air of indignation,  thrust their reflection onto the slick green Limpopo look of Cockle Creek at Teralba. This was a grand new project: a line to the mines at Killingworth and West Wallsend.  It must have seemed like an optimism of the age; now a memory.  How much of the stuff that we engage with, in the belief that it is the stuff of sound planning for the future, may, in turn, become rusted grass topped piers in the creek?

The stories we can tell though: of best endeavour, or deceit, of human beings with all of their follies and fascinations, are the things which will inform us. There was a time where the creek was also a thoroughfare, then no more.

As things keep changing, as new bridges superimpose themselves on old, the importance of increasing the horizon of possibility for every child continues to assume a clarity which needs to be promoted as a simple and wonderful principle for what we do as educators within public schools.  That is what we do.

And the grass topped bridge?

We’ll cross that when we come to it.

(Pics taken on mobile phone en route from meeting at Speers Point to Barnsley via Teralba 25 May 2010)