There’s more than one way for a head to start a relaxing weekend. Jonathan Fawcett goes in search of a less-than-peaceful easy feline.

Stray cat strut

It’s 6pm on Friday. What should I be doing? Going home for a glass of wine? Heading to the pub with friends? Playing five-a-side football? Looking forward to a meal and a relaxing evening?

Quite possibly one or more of those, but this is a dark, cold and rainy evening, one of those miserable ones you get in early November and I’m looking for the cat. It’s not mine and I’m not at home; I’m walking around our 23-acre site with the caretaker, looking for the black feline that seems to have adopted us and is causing havoc.

I’m armed with a cardboard box and parcel tape and even if the quips to students and staff earlier in the day about skinning it w when I catch it weren’t totally serious, I’m starting to get more than slightly annoyed with the marauding moggy.

No, acting as cat-catcher-in-chief is not on my job description, but I sometimes wonder how much of what I do most days actually is.

So why am I herding cats? Because, although capturing it won’t directly affect our 3– 4LP data for maths and English next year, its presence is quickly moving from amusing to tolerable to damned nuisance.

Not only is he starting to scratch some of the children who stroke him, he’s wandering into classrooms to disrupt lessons, which is particularly bad when the teacher happens to have a form of feline-phobia.

On Wednesday evening, he managed to sneak into the English office when the caretaker was locking up and spend the night there. His thank-you gift was left in both solid and liquid form, the stench putting the room out of use on Thursday and requiring a costly clean-up operation from a professional company.

We’ve decided against asking him to take the CAT tests.

Horse play

It’s not the first time we’ve had disruption from four-legged friends. I once arrived at school to be told that five horses were grazing down on the field, although I wasn’t aware of any pony club bookings for that day.

It turned out that someone had cut the fence on a local field and the horses had wandered around for most of the night before finding a way through our hedge. They seemed quite happy, but posed a health and safety risk if they chose to run up around the school buildings.

The owners were eventually located and brought a horse box to the road by the bottom corner of the field. How would they get them in there? Easy. The owner produced a mare on heat from the box; the eager boys got a whiff and cantered off to the box at Grand-National-winning pace. I’m not sure I’d have fancied driving the van back.

More early morning shenanigans followed a couple of months later, this time in the form of a big hole that had appeared overnight. An old coal mining tunnel running under the field had collapsed, creating a gaping crater and the potential for a few students to disappear down it.

Resisting the temptation to draw up a quick list of the ones we’d like to get rid of, we had to fence off the area and contact the coal people to come and fill it in and make the area safe. We haven’t yet risk-assessed the potential for the whole school population to disappear underground during sports day.

The most recent surreal occurrence took place a few weeks ago. I was showing some prospective parents around the school when a child came up to me and asked if I’d seen the balloon. Realising from my perplexed expression that clearly I hadn’t, she proceeded to inform me that a red Virgin hot-air balloon had just landed on the football pitch. Apparently they’d run out of fuel and identified our field as the most appropriate spot to touch down.

Rumours that Richard Branson had bought an Ofsted franchise proved false when a team of inspectors failed to materialise but we did offer to read transcripts of Michael Gove’s speeches to see if we could create enough hot air for it to take off again.

Sometimes it seems that however hard I try to focus on the important, strategic stuff, there’s always something taking my time and energy away from it.

James Herriot entertained me as a child with his stories of the trials and tribulations of a Yorkshire vet. It’s not totally inconceivable that I’ll be tempted to resort to sharing my own experiences in print – It Shouldn’t Happen to a Headteacher – to supplement my rapidly dwindling pension fund. Unless someone beats me to it...

• Jonathan Fawcett is Headteacher at Swanwick Hall School, Derbyshire.

Want the last word?Last Word always welcomes contributions from members. If you’d like to share your humorous observations of school life, email Permjit Mann at leader@ascl.org.uk ASCL offers a modest honorarium.

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