My guest this week is Sally Bernard who was a schoolteacher for many years, currently living in Deal, Kent. She originally wanted to run an antique shop but her father played a key role in the career route that she followed.

Sally talks about her involvement with Sure Start, and why she disagreed with the late Glenys Kinnock on reading by osmosis. We learn why Sally wanted to be a better teacher than the teachers who had taught her, and Sally also reflects on the nature of the teaching experience.

She went to the Open University and worked as a community education officer at an aquarium in Bermuda.

Sally discusses growing up in Bristol and looking after international friends from various countries in Europe when she was young. Her father had been a medical officer in Belsen and her mother had been a nurse.

We talk about the role that technology plays and how she still sends letters and we find out why New Zealand was such a precious place for Sally and her husband Adrian to live, and how it matched their expectations.

We find out why Sally likes revisiting the past and why she doesn’t have any regrets. We also talk about the nature of home and whether she would consider any places more ‘home’ than others.

She remembers time off from work when she was living in London to see a very bloody production of Julius Caesar at the Barbican, and we turn to the nature of private education, and why there weren’t many good role models for Sally in her day. The best one was a dance teacher who was fired because she had taught her pupils dances from West Side Story.

Then, at the end of the interview we discover why Sally is neither a looking back nor a looking forward type of person.

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