THEY don't change heads too often at King Ted's.

Since the school took its current name just over a century ago, there have only ever been seven of them.

With 20 years in charge, Michael Lewis has maintained that sense of continuity - and he retires today as the current longest serving secondary headteacher in Sheffield.

During that time, much has changed in education - and King Edward VII, with its split site in Crosspool and Broomhill, has often been at the centre of the action.

Born in Belfast in 1949, Michael was inspired to teach while taking a degree in modern languages at Oxford - and he was very much an idealist.
"I was inspired by the ideal of comprehensive education as a vehicle for social justice - I was very committed to it," he said.

"I did my teacher training in York but I chose to do my teaching practice in Hull, in a very tough school in the shadow of the prison. I thought if I could survive there, I could cope anywhere. I met kids I'd only read about previously."

Michael became a language teacher and had his first experience of Sheffield in the mid 70s while in a post at a school in Belper, Derbyshire.

"Two or three times a term we'd come up in a bus to the Silver Blades ice rink. I didn't find Sheffield a pretty place," he recalls.

By the mid 80s Michael was deputy head at a school in Oxfordshire - but found both he and his family were ready for a change.

"We were keen to move - we wanted to move north away from the Thatcherite values which dominated the south. I'd never heard of King Edward's but it looked interesting so I applied. I started here in 1988, I was 38 at the time."

Michael's predecessor Russell Sharrock had guided the school through turbulent times, from being the city's pre-eminent boys' grammar school to a well respected co-educational comprehensive.

Michael's commitment to the comprehensive ideal was by now transformed into a fascination with the nitty gritty of learning - although now a head, he was still determined to continue teaching.

"It's about inspiring young people and helping to shape their lives - I'm still in touch with people I taught 30 years ago," he said.

Michael's own two sons were both pupils at King Edward's - with his wife Petra playing the lead role at parents' evenings!

"My kids chose to come here and they had a very happy time - I did want the school to be good enough for them. It's not paradise here, I see it warts and all, but it worked fine for them," Michael said.

"King Edward's was a school ready for change when I arrived and it needed to move on. I was instantly impressed with the seriousness with which the staff approached their work - there was the feeling that education was a serious business.

"But there was a strange lack of confidence in the school. It wasn't the grammar it once was, but neither was it a confident comprehensive. It needed to be given a sense of its own worth and to take pride in its diversity, not to be stuck in a Broomhill, gin and tonic, white highlands mentality.

"It was a school punching below its weight. The facilities were dilapidated, especially the Lynwood and Melbourne Avenue annexes, which were later sold off. The school had lost its traditions, its archival material was neglected and it had no pride in its past."

The late 1980s was a period of great change for education in any event, with the introduction of the National Curriculum and Ofsted, and with schools being given far more control over their own destinies.

"We took all this in our stride, although the local authority was strange, seemingly stuck in a time warp," Michael said.

"This school has always had some exceptionally gifted children - I had to cope with strong complaints at times from parents who were university professors and the like. But I grew very fond of the place - it gradually enmeshes you."

But there were difficult times, most especially the early 1990s when funding for education had been reduced almost to a drip feed, and confidence was low in the city council's ability to fight the corner for Sheffield schools.

"The leadership in the education authority was certainly poor at officer level and it was a very, very difficult time. The Conservative government was determined to do Sheffield no favours and meanwhile we were running our own affairs for the first time, with a huge amount to learn," Michael said.

"Our budget is now around £9 million a year, but I'd had no financial training before I became a head. Things began to improve with the construction of our new Crescent building - which we funded ourselves from the sale of our annexes at a time when nothing new was being built in the city's education sector."
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