4. An Interview with Our Principal, Ms Needham
On Thursday 24th February, we interviewed our Principal Ms Jayne Needham. We asked her a series of questions in the hope to learn something from our new principal.
1. When did you start being principal in BSB? - I started in August 2021 but because of Covid-19 I am unable to fly to Beijing. Finally, in December, I arrived at BSB.
2. Why did you want to be a principal? - I have been a principal for a long time in other schools. When you start being a teacher you only need to be responsible for 20-25 children but being a principal, you need to be responsible for the whole of primary and secondary, so the higher the position the higher the influence!
3. What is your favourite subject? Why? - Maths because I used to be a secondary math teacher. I enjoyed the part when I am teaching someone to learn something new.
4. Do you have any fun facts about you? - I love dogs and I have lived in 5 different countries.
5. What hobbies do you have outside of school? - I like to travel when possible and I love to travel by subway to other cities. I also like reading fiction books. When I was young, I like diving. After you go down the water you forget how scary that was because you see a lot of beautiful things.
6. How is being a principal different to a class teacher? - Well I think being principal need to look after more people and to have more concerns in different areas, like the canteen and the buses. Also, if something is broken how much it costs; are the teachers doing a good job or they need some help are all up to me to decide!
7. What is the best/worst part being a principal? - The best part definitely is being able to interact with students. My best part of the day is to look around the school, talk to students and look at what work they are doing. The worst part is to have lots of long boring meetings.
8. How do you aim to stand out from the previous principal? - The only thing you can do is be youself, working on the things that you think is important to you. For me, it’s the teaching and learning going through the classroom. I really like it when students try their best and engage themselves.
9. What is the difference between being an international school’s principal and a British national school? - I think that we are mixed here with lots of nationalities, backgrounds and experiences, so many things are different. My children are in international schools like you so they have friends from across the world.
10. Do you have any challenging moments being principal? - I suppose that the principal looks after a lot of things in the school. The principal looks after two different things so it’s about the school having the right resources, teachers and the right money are allocated to the right areas so it’s a kind of business side of things. Then there is a kind of teaching and learning things like students in the classroom getting the best opportunities. I think I need to balance these two, both are important to me, like 50-50.
11. Do you like to work with the BSB’s staffs and students? Why? - Yes because it’s really interesting that there’s over 100 teachers here and a lot of students. They are really different - some older, some younger, different background, different nationalities.
The young journalist enjoyed interviewing and getting to know our new principal. We hope you learned a lot about our principal Ms Jayne Needham.
By Suri, Sophie and Nico