Mrs Maxine Pittaway
Teaching Awards 2009 Winner
The DfE Award for Enterprise
St Christopher's School, WREXHAM
Maxine Pittaway is a headteacher who is constantly “fizzing with new ideas”. If she isn’t arranging the opening of the new charity shop at her school, then she might be found meeting with local businesses enticing them to come on board and work with the school on some new project.
St Christopher’s is a school for children with learning difficulties and disabilities, and Maxine believes that teachers should look at what pupils can do rather than what they cannot do. So she has introduced an Entrepreneurship and Business Policy at the school to offer pupils opportunities in work experience and give them a sense of achievement in the skills they will need in adulthood.
As a result of her efforts, the school now has a fully operating hair & beauty salon, a café, a Fairtrade shop, a car valeting business and a charity shop. It also has an Environmental Task Force, and a Millennium Eco Centre which has its own café. All of these enterprising facilities are open to the public or serve the public.
Maxine believes that the skills gained at any one of the enterprises can be transferred into other environments. The hair & beauty salon, for example, also admits mainstream pupils from other school as part of the 14 to 19 Learning Pathways programme, where they can gain NVQ Level 1 or Level 2 qualifications, while the Eco Centre has more than 16,000 visitors a year. She opened the shops when she was told by Wrexham Regeneration Forum that the local retail sector would need workers in the future.
Through her leadership and inspiring others, new possibilities are also being created by other staff. For example, one teacher suggested that the charity shop should expand and sell some items on Ebay, giving the children additional learning opportunities.
Colleagues said Maxine always thinks “out of the box” and has instilled a can-do attitude, constantly generating new ideas to benefit the pupils and the school.
One of the judges said: “As a result of her vision and drive St Christopher’s is like no other special needs school I have ever visited nor indeed heard about. I returned from the visit feeling inspired but also rather inadequate in not having been able to provide similar opportunities for my pupils.”
