Gary Hickey's background is as a talented guitarist and composer, but was head-hunted by Ercall Wood as Head of Performing Arts before eventually ending up at Haberdashers' Adams as a Deputy Head in 2008. He also spent time as Head of Music and Head of Drama. He has been Headmaster since January 2015.

You’ve been at Adams since 2009. After 16 years, what's your go-to breakfast as headmaster?

“Well, every morning, I get in at around 8:15 and I only ever have two slices of toast. There's one scene in one of the Avengers where Samuel L Jackson goes on about having toast, and how you can only cut it in triangles, not rectangles. Which is correct. You can only eat it if it's in triangles. That's just the law.”

How does it feel to have been in the school for so long and what does it mean to you?

“I’ve always felt very privileged and honoured to be part of Adams which I hope a lot of pupils do as well. I always say to staff that we should never take for granted that we're in the school that we are. I think, according to the board, I'm the 21st headmaster in an unbroken line since 1656. So that's quite- not many schools in the country are like that. So, I still feel very privileged and a little bit astonished every now and then that I ended up here, because it wasn't a part of the original plan.”

How did you end up here?

“Well when I finished my degree, which was in music and theatre, I was actually a professional guitarist for about seven years. So that was what I did as a job. I did recitals and concerts and I was occasionally in bands for other people or theatre shows, things like that. Then I gradually started getting involved in doing music for contemporary dance companies, which got me more involved with education, which got me more involved with directing shows for education. So, I'd done some work with courses for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre, when a head of a school approached me, they'd seen some youth theatre shows I’d directed and said, you should be a teacher. And I said no, I shouldn't, I have no interest in being a teacher at all and having to wear a suit all day and having your whole time dictated by bells and stuff. But he kept on working at me and eventually I applied for a job in a school on the other side of Telford called Ercall Wood where I was head of drama, then head of performing arts and I then gradually moved into head of year, before I became deputy head. Then I went on a kind of free transfer to Abraham Darby for a year as vice principal and it was while I was there that the deputy job came up here so that's when in 2009, I came here as deputy, and then 6 or 7 years later the headship came up. So, A: being a teacher wasn't in my original plan, and B: if you'd have said to 20-year-old me, you're going to be ending up as the headmaster of a 400-year-old grammar school, I would have never believed you.”

Do you remember how your first year as headmaster went?

“It was quite a tricky year, because I had always wanted to change the admissions policy for the school. I always say when I'm speaking to the year fours or fives who come to look around, the entrance test is like running a race, if you start a race and the gun goes off and everyone runs, the first three people will get the gold, silver, bronze medal, but if you're fourth, you don't get anything. You could argue that's completely the fairest way, but only if everyone is starting at the same starting point and sadly a lot of children don't because they might come from disadvantaged backgrounds. I wanted to make that fairer, so we introduced the oversubscription criteria; then later we changed it again for the children who live in the Telford area, because we have loads and loads of kids, seven buses a day, that come from all over the place, which is very flattering that they all want to come to Adams, but it was squeezing out our local children in the borough. So, my first year was changing all those things. It was also the year that Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the opposition and he was very anti grammar schools, but of course he came here. So, I remember we were getting a lot of recognition in that first year for helping more disadvantaged children, which most grammar schools didn't at the time. We got onto BBC news, we were on the Today programme, we had an article in the Guardian. We were on TV for doing all these things for social mobility. I got recognised by the then Prime Minister, Theresa May, who invited me down to Downing Street because of what we were doing. So then you had Jeremy Corbyn, who was passionately against grammar schools arguing at the time that grammar schools don't do anything for the disadvantaged, and I remember saying to our governors, it's only going to be a matter of time before someone in a news office in London goes hang on a minute, you've got this grammar school that's getting national recognition for helping disadvantaged children and you've got the leader of the opposition who went to a grammar school saying how bad grammar schools are because they don't help disadvantaged children and- oh my god it's his own school. It was only about two weeks later that they realised and then it all went crazy in terms of attention on the school, positive attention for us, because of the work we were doing, but it all went a little bit bonkers for a while. In my first year.”

You've been a big advocate for arts and music in school. Why do you think they're so important in education?

“Well, obviously I come from an arts background myself, so no one ever has to convince me of the power of the arts. For me personally, the arts just enrich life and I’ve had the experience of seeing how the arts can literally save people’s lives. Adams used to be, and very successfully so, a school that was famous for science and maths and people would go from here into usually medicine or engineering, so I think the arts give an outlet for people, that isn’t any better or worse than the maths or sciences, just different, because people are different. The arts are around us everywhere, we have pictures, we have music, all of these things had to be created with an artistic input. There's also a very pragmatic version, the arts generate over £110 billion a year for the UK economy. Over 6% of the gross value added to the entire UK economy is generated by the arts. Now that is massive, absolutely massive. Ultimately, I think any culture needs the arts. It’s a mechanism for survival and to be able to express things.”

So, looking back, what were your proudest achievements as headmaster?

“Well, I'm proud of the fact that Adams is now a very different school in terms of supporting disadvantaged children. There are also little things along the way. When I first joined as the school’s deputy, the then head said, we really want to try and make more of things like house music and the Dixon cup, which actually used to be held in the sixth form centre. You're only aware of the sixth form centre being as it is now, but it didn't used to be two floors, it used to be just one big building called the performing arts centre, it had raked seating, like in Hamilton Hall, and that was where House Music and Dixon Cup used to be, so you could only ever have one house in it to watch at one time. So, I was the person who took it over to the sports hall which now means that the whole school can see those things, and that had never happened before. That's been lost in the history of time, but I'm quite proud of that because it’s morphed into all the incredible things that we have now.”

Do you have a favourite memory from your time at Adams or a few favourite memories?

“House music small choirs are always particularly special for me because there have been amazing, amazing performances over the years. I can't sing so for me to hear a good choir is really a kind of stirring thing. I can remember in my first house athletics, at the end, the whole school had a tug of war, which I had never seen before in my life, just to see this sea of colours cheering each other on, was something really quite special, as was my first cross country, I ran the cross country, I say ran, I stumbled for about my first 8 or 9 years at Adams; I was always at the back. I think those are the sorts of things that we almost take for granted at Adams, because everyone is just used to them. In all the previous schools I'd been at, we would never have got the whole school together and just said, run. It would have been chaos. Things like that are quite special, the fact a school can do that and wants to do it.

What was the most challenging moment or decision that you've had to make as headmaster? 

“Covid. Covid was probably the worst time of my career because you had a crazy situation that was just totally unprecedented. We found out with two days' notice that the school was going to close. We were in a situation where, like most schools, we had to have some staff on site for the children of the key workers; people who worked in the NHS or delivery services and as it happened, because of the nature of the school, we had a lot of people who work in the NHS, so by default we had a lot of their children coming into school, so there were maybe 100 pupils in every day. We made a decision very early on that we were going to embrace this new “Zoom” that no one had really heard of before quite quickly. We gave staff about 4 or 5 days to convert all their lessons into this new sort of mindset and then from the start we said right, we're off. So, we had form time in the morning so everyone could just meet up with each other because that was important, we made the lessons slightly shorter so people wouldn't just be on screens for 5 or 6 hours a day, we'd have assemblies online, we had a magazine that we asked people to contribute to. Alongside all of that, we were also trying to deliver a whole curriculum because don't forget, people were about to take their GCSEs and A-levels. So, these were serious, serious times. The government was in quite a bit of disarray, particularly the education side of the government. The Department for Education would always give very specific guidance about what to do and what not to do, and they would sometimes update it overnight and sometimes twice a day, but never tell schools, so we would only sometimes find out about changes through social media. The reality was that I would sit in front of a screen with yesterday's guidance open here and the new guidance open here, and because they didn't tell us what the difference was you literally had to scroll through and try and see where the paragraphs were different sizes to find out whether something had changed. That used to be the first half hour of my day, every day. Crazy situation. That was a very challenging time, just for the management of a school and also on the whole philosophical side, because we had lots of people genuinely scared and frightened because they didn't know what this virus was, especially young children, and it was just trying to keep their spirits up as well.”

What advice would you give to the next headmaster Mr Biggins?

“I don't think Mr Biggins needs much advice to be honest. He's been a deputy on the SLT here for a number of years; he knows the school inside and out. I’ve had some regrets over the things I’ve missed over the years like a lot of my kids’ birthdays and my anniversaries. My wife's been very patient and supportive, but if I went back and asked my kids if I missed their birthday party because I was doing some report, they wouldn't have cared about the report, and now I probably can't remember what that report even was. You miss a lot of those things along the way. If you sweat what you think is the big stuff, then the small stuff gets forgotten, but then sometimes maybe the small stuff is the big stuff. So, any advice I would give would be to just keep a sense of perspective.”

What important qualities do you think a headmaster should have?

“Integrity. Kindness. You've got to be able to listen. We talk a lot about leadership, but I believe a lot in followership as well. Have people around you that are there to tell you what they think. You’ve got to have a sense of humour. You've also got to have a life outside of work. The work life balance, I think, is important. I’ve got to be completely honest, I think I’m still working on that one.”

So now you're leaving, what will you miss most about being at Adams?

“I will miss seeing young people having fun and developing because in my experience, they are remarkable.”

Do you have a final message for students and staff? Any words of wisdom?

[Points to a picture next to his desk] “That's a good one. So yeah, if there's a closing quote, maybe it’s that one.”

“Follow your heart, but take your brain with you”