Mrs Paulette Hanscombe
Teaching Awards 2007 Winner
The Ted Wragg Award for Lifetime Achievement, sponsored by the Innovation Unit in Wales
Llanrumney High School, CARDIFF
Paulette Hanscombe turns lives around.
Young people attend school who would not have attended without her. There are others performing in theatre and undertaking Duke of Edinburgh awards who would have remained disaffected without her unstinting and unconditional care and support for them and their families.
Parents of children who attend Llanrumney high school trust Paulette Hanscombe’s professionalism and sound judgement implicitly. As social inclusion co-ordinator she is renowned for never giving up on anybody, the care and support structures she has developed praised by inspectors as a real strength of the school.
Paulette’s gift for empathy and her steady hand has been developed over many years. She began her professional life in 1968 as a science teacher and worked in Birmingham, Sheffield and Doncaster before settling in Cardiff. She came to Llanrumney in 1988 as a supply science teacher but moved into pastoral support as her outstanding skills in this area were recognised.
When she took up the coordinator’s role her headteacher charged her with reducing numbers of pupils leaving without qualifications – the figure has fallen from 15 to two per cent; he asked her to improve whole-school attendance – that has increased from 82 to 90 per cent. He asked her to develop an alternative, attractive curriculum for disaffected pupils – her achievement in this field is held up as a role model for other schools elsewhere.
She has involved pupils in the “Leaves of Hope” charity engaged with orphanages in Belarus. A number of pupils have gone out to work there several times – a life-changing experience as they see others worse off than themselves.
Our judges said the pupil accolades came “spontaneously and from the heart”: “I didn’t come to school until Mrs Hanscombe bothered with me.” “She turned my life around,” to quote just two.
