One teacher, one child, one book, and one pen can change the world!

The world needs more teachers, this country needs more teachers and Buckingham needs more teachers! And so I had the greatest of pleasures handing out the certificates for the successful completion of training for a dozen new teachers trained at Bourton Meadow Academy school over the last year. 

They are pictured below together with the Head of Training Helen Byrom and other key tutors. It has been a very hard working year of study and practice for them, I know. It will probably be even tougher next year when then all take on their first year's work as a teacher. And I wish them all the very best in the years to come.

Below the pics is the speech I delivered.

It is my great pleasure and honour to be here this evening for the awarding of certificates to the new graduates of the Bourton Meadow Teacher Training programme. 

Just to begin: thank you all: new teachers, experienced teachers and tutors... thank you all for being so committed to the profession of teaching. As Malala has said “one child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world”. You are all changing worlds, opening vistas and nurturing ambitions. 

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for all that you have done and will be doing for the young people of Buckingham and beyond.

It’s my job as Mayor to be relentless in searching for all the ways to help Buckingham become an even better place in which to live, work, study, visit and play. Thanking you and supporting you is a big part of that.

As I see it, you are in the ambition business. I am too and always have been. 

Ambition is a very important word to me. When I review all of what I have sought to do in my life: professionally, personally and politically, I have arrived at the conclusion that ambition lies at the heart of it all. I have always aimed to do all that I can to help create a world in which everyone has dreams and ambitions, and the wherewithal to achieve these. 

Ambition is a precious thing and I think we need more of it in our world. Ambition, hope and dreams are good for our health and well being, and they good for our society too as they drive our economy forwards and make improvements in community spirit.  

And so as Mayor, I am carrying on with my focus on ambition. Ambition is a key theme of my Mayoralty. I have been and will be looking for all the ways in which I can support, nurture, recognise and rejoice in the ambition present in all those whom I am meeting. And I see a lot of it here tonight!

I have initiated the ‘Buckingham Ambition Project’. I The shape the BAP is slowly emerging and so please let me know if you would like to be involved in some way. 

For me teaching is all about cradling and developing that fragile thing called ambition. Perhaps that is the reason why we remember our teachers decades on. 

I can still name and picture my primary school teachers: Mrs Johnson, Mr Laugher and Mr McHaffie. Mr McHaffie used to keep a second shirt on the back of his classroom door as by lunchtime his passion for music, English, poetry and drama usually meant he had worked up quite a sweat and had to change his shirt! I remember that sort of stuff and I bet you all do too… I think that it is because teachers help us shape our nascent ambitions that memories of them stick with us.

But I left out two teachers on that list: Lorna Harvey and Ron Harvey. My parents. They were both teachers and they both taught me for much of my early years. I was kind of home-schooled at school if you like! Indeed my dad was a teacher of teachers for the later part of his career. So I have watched what teachers do in the day times, in the evenings and at the weekends… And it is even tougher now, I know.

So I am here to wish you well in your careers as teachers. Please never forget that the children that you teach will probably never forget you. And I know that you will be doing all that you can to help them be ambitious for themselves and the world.

So may I thank you again sincerely for being wonderful, magical, liberating, inspiring, sponsors of dreams and ambitions: in other words, for being teachers!