Principal Anna Jordan says her pupils draw from values of fearlessness despite the 2017 tragedy overshadowing her school
Kensington Aldridge Academy is overshadowed by the grim spectacle of a tower clad in white plastic sheeting. Upon it, a banner reads: Grenfell, forever in our hearts.
For the school’s community, led by its principal, Anna Jordan, the fire that claimed 72 lives, including five of its pupils, will always be in their hearts.
But Jordan is determined it doesn’t overshadow pupils’ prospects.
She’s “nervous” about talking about Grenfell because she’s determined the school should not be defined by the tragedy. Since the fire in 2017, Jordan – who has worked for KAA since it was founded 10 years ago – has gone above and beyond to help local families rebuild their lives.
The task is made harder because nobody has been prosecuted over the disaster, and the government is yet to decide on the tower’s future.
The “huge amount of anger and emotion” the community felt was further inflamed by the recent publication of the public inquiry’s damning final report, which blamed cladding manufacturers and successive governments for failing to deal with safety concerns.
Jordan says that while young people everywhere are struggling post-Covid with their mental health, “we feel that magnified here” as “people are waiting for answers”.
But the principal and her team are fully focused on helping students channel that emotion into a force for good.
Intrepid spirit
A colourful painting of smiling KAA pupils by former pupil Georgina Smith, 19, (who spoke at the inquiry), takes pride of place in Jordan’s office. She praises the former Grenfell resident for being “vocal” and “a great example of the community trying to move forward”.
She embodies the spirit of ‘Intrepidus’, the motto which KAA’s first principal David Benson gave the school. He had no idea then how the word would come to perfectly capture the values pupils would need to draw upon. Pupils are commended on the school’s noticeboard for “showing intrepidus in everything they do”.
Jordan left the Blessed Thomas Holford Catholic College in Altrincham, Manchester, where she’d worked for the previous decade, to help Benson set up KAA as a deputy head.
While South Kensington is known for its wealth and glamour, the north of the borough where KAA is located is one of the country’s most deprived postcodes. Half the borough’s secondary pupils attend independent schools, and Capita founder Sir Rod Aldridge built KAA here because there was no state school provision.
When the £80 million school was still a building site its leadership team visited other schools across the country for inspiration. The culture they came up with was based around KAA pupils “needing joy in their school day”.
Jordan says there are “no silent corridors”. Pupils are given free “full-on” breakfasts from 8am. Key stage three pupils get half an hour of daily guided reading to create a “really positive introduction to the school day”. And house competitions create “excuses for the relationships to grow between staff and students”.
Beyond the curriculum
Jordan is grateful her own happy schooling experience, at Sedgehill School (now academy) in Catford, southeast London, gave her extra-curricular opportunities: exchange trips to France and Russia, a minibus trip to Slovakia and the chance to canoe in the London Youth Games. She and Benson wanted to create similar opportunities at KAA.
At first, extra-curricular activities were made mandatory, with every pupil made to stay at school until 5pm. That rule was later relaxed, but while “big numbers” still do extracurricular activities, Jordan wishes it was more as they “get so much from it”.
It’s harder to arrange international trips after Brexit and Covid too, with “much greater finance and red tape barriers”. But KAA still does its best. Its pupil premium intake (60 per cent of its cohort) is funded for such excursions by its “phenomenal” charitable wing, KAA Intrepidus Trust.
Through Aldridge, KAA has forged links with independent schools including Charterhouse and Godolphin, whose curriculum leaders helped design its curriculum. Nearby Latymer Upper School accommodated KAA’s sixth formers following the fire, and others help KAA pupils prepare for interviews and with Oxbridge applications.
The school collects food for local families too, but while KAA has “thought about” becoming a community hub for local support services, as some other schools and trusts are doing, Jordan believes now is “not the right time”.
School staff are already “caught up in conversations they’re not equipped to deal with”, she adds. “There isn’t anything at our school that isn’t trauma-informed.”
Grenfell fire
For Jordan, that trauma began when she was woken at 1.30am on June 14 seven years ago by a phone call telling her a blaze had broken out at Grenfell Tower, across the road from her home.
Her initial sense of horror, still “very difficult” to talk about, turned to action as it became apparent the fire had destroyed KAA’s playground and smoke damage had made its building “uninhabitable”.
Jordan spent that weekend rewriting the school timetable at her parents’ house – her dad is a former social services chairman and her mum is a former secondary headteacher.
Pupils were rehoused in other schools while “the fastest school ever built” was establishedfrom Portakabins in nine weeks, just a 15-minute walk away. (KAA still retains the site, which proved “helpful” during Covid.)
At first “maintaining the feel of the school was incredibly difficult”, Jordan says. Then, after the permanent school building was repaired, there was lingering “nervousness” about moving back.
“The later it got in the year, the more [the reluctance] was about emotion and trauma.”
Over the following months, Jordan “went into overdrive”. All staff and students, for example, went on year-group residential trips that summer.
It wasn’t until October that the emotional toll really hit her, but the move back to the permanent site the following September gave Jordan further insight into how trauma triggers people “in different ways”.
“Particularly affected” pupils found taking exams in the sports hall or dance studio, located nearest to Grenfell, “really difficult”. Windows overlooking the tower are still covered in wrapping to prevent pupils having to see it.
The first fire drill after Grenfell was a “really difficult experience” for Jordan. Several staff still require “advance warning” of tests so they’re “not retraumatised”.
When KAA commemorates Grenfell’s anniversary, Jordan is mindful to prepare new staff for “how they might see students or parents react”, and “so they don’t feel excluded from what the school’s been through… they need to own that in the same way that everybody else does”.
The school has multiple therapists on site “all day every day”. Although the initial trauma support “tailed off” over time, “it’s picked up again” recently, partly due to anger over the inquiry.
Recruitment woes
Jordan’s consideration of her staff’s feelings are reflected in the school’s outstanding 2017 and 2024 Ofsted reports, praising the school’s “exceptionally high” staff morale.
Given this commendation, and the school being a high-profile performing and creative arts specialist academy located near the Royal Academy of Dance and the BBC and ITV headquarters, you might assume that recruiting a drama teacher would be easy.
Yet KAA is having to try to find someone from overseas after three unsuccessful recruitment rounds.
Five years ago they were “inundated” with 40 applicants for one drama role. Now, “universities aren’t training drama teachers”. “If we’re struggling, then other schools must be on their knees,” says Jordan.
Music is also tricky; “Hardly any” local state schools offer GCSE or A-level music courses anymore.
Jordan also finds herself “butting against a brick wall” when it comes to the funding for performing and creative arts. It would be “disastrous” for KAA to lose this thread, but she’s “wondering how viable it is next year”.
Meanwhile, the local independent schools are investing ever greater amounts of “money and time” into cultural capital initiatives.
“We just can’t compete with that but we want to, because otherwise we’re compounding our pupils’ disadvantage.”
Managing tensions
To counter that disadvantage, KAA has a large pastoral team, with two heads of year for each year group and regular parent coffee mornings. Despite this, parent complaints have risen since Covid.
Jordan says “it’s a small number of very difficult complaints, and in every situation, it’s because the family are living through really complicated circumstances”.
She adds: “Sometimes, it’s hard to know what to do. I find myself wanting to say, ‘please just trust us that we’re doing the right thing’. But it comes down to a lack of faith in the future and the world around us.”
That’s been worsened by the crisis in the Middle East. KAA has Jewish pupils as well as a large Moroccan Muslim community.
Pupil protests took place shortly after Jordan became principal, and were “probably” her “toughest experience” in leadership.
But Jordan “can’t imagine ever moving on” from KAA. She doubts she “could find a school where the staff are as good or as committed”.
The way that “pupils and staff took care of each other” in the aftermath of Grenfell is what she’s most proud of in her career.
“That legacy of care has remained”, she believes. “But it needs nurturing”.
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