Angela Moore, a Jamaican educator, turned around a failing school in the UK to a Cinderella success story.
Moore attributes this feat to being Jamaican. “Jamaican are super humans” she said. Watch the enclosed video to get this explanation.
Jamaican Education Trailblazer in the UK
In this week’s edition of A Ray of Hope, we look at how a Jamaican educator transformed a failing primary school in London and made it the top school in the United Kingdom.
In 2014, Jamaican Angela Moore became the first person of the ethnic minority to lead the Saint Anthony’s Catholic Primary School in Newham East London. Before that, the school was languishing at the bottom of the education rankings in one of the most deprived boroughs in the UK.
Moore explained “Just because something is hard doesn’t mean it’s impossible”.
“We must find a way around it and we must look at it and see how can we come up with the solutions here? Yes, and it’s changing the way that they think and getting them to book trends, getting them to not buy into what society says about where they come from because where they come from is not what matters, it’s who they are inside”
Her passion for the classroom became the main driving force behind the school’s transformation from failing to a success story in just eight years. The once struggling Catholic-based institution is now the school of the decade and the number one primary school in Britain.
Angela Moore in the discussion with TVJ News said “I’m going to work on raising standards of the school, raising the outcomes for the children of the school, making sure that the quality of education that was on offer at the school was something that would give rise to, the outcomes that the children had and move the school up”.
Before the turnaround, the school was on the UK’s low-performance list. It meant there was a desperate need for something new and the performing arts became that key ingredient.
“One of the main drivers was to raise the children’s self-esteem, self-image, self-worth, self-confidence. So looking at the self and building that and then I used the performing arts to help to drive that because I was heavily involved with the JCDC when I was in Jamaica” Moore said.
Ms. Moore has managed to raise the expectations of her students and staff by employing a can do mindset. She challenged the perception that being on the special educational needs and disabilities register in the UK as an excuse to underachieve. Now the Education Trailblazer is encouraging Jamaicans to shoot for the stars and dreams big wherever they are to make Jamaica proud.
Moore went on to say “What we need to recognize is our own genius. Jamaicans are not normal. Jamaicans are super humans, and we need to know that in every way, in the way we think, in the way we behave, in the way we live, in our culture, in our outlook, in our talent, and we need to celebrate that. We need to celebrate it, and wherever we are, we need to make the rest of the world know that we are here and that we are here because we are really excellent at what we do”
