Do you look at your life and wonder what you’re doing? Perhaps you’re too busy ever to step back and consider its balance: balance between work and your outside life, be it domestic or social; and/or balance between what you have to do and what you want to do. It can be scary in the small hours of the morning, when sleep is AWOL, to lie staring at the ceiling asking yourselves those questions. It is often easier just to follow your nose and assume that there is joy enough in your life so that there is no point contemplating disturbing that.
One of the problems about retirement – and personally I’m no fan of the status – is sometimes it is inevitable that you have to look back and wonder about all the twists and turns you consciously or unconsciously made, whether forced upon you or happily chosen. This past week, two occasions have forced such reflection on me. Often I have felt, and continue to feel, that my life does not amount to a coherent whole. So it was reassuring to pause a moment to note that there was a degree of coherence after all, in what I have chosen to do beyond the day job. I have always believed one should seize opportunities (within reason, which is very much weasel wording, as it begs the question of what is reasonable), but that can lead to a degree of randomness.
This week I had the honour of planting the 1000th tree on the Churchill College site. It is now 2 years since I stepped down as Master, but this ceremony was designed to honour my ten-year tenure. Being asked to say a few words I decided to say a little bit about what I have been doing since retirement, not least to stop everyone asking me that same question over lunch. Later in the week I talked at the University’s Technician Conference, which turned out to be a big affair with over 250 participants. My role was to talk about the importance of technical support throughout my career and what – in the spirit of the Technician Commitment – needs to be done to improve technicians’ visibility and career paths.
Members of the Churchill College community at the planting of the 1000th tree (an oak) on site
Both these talks enabled me to talk about the skills pipeline – not least through my role as Chair of the Science Advisory Council (SAC) for the Department of Education, as well as more local initiatives; the new challenges devolution is likely to make for post-16 education and the changing expectations for post-14 education everywhere and what this may mean for the wider skills landscape. Skills is an easy word to toss around, but when facing up to the growing problem of NEETs (not in employment, education or training), what happens during a child’s early life at home and at school has to be considered in depth, not just what happens at 16 or 18. This is a fast-changing policy space, and one that will, for instance, be likely to impact on the technician pipeline in years to come.
So, let me return to my own retirement and whether one can ever, at any stage, end up with a coherent portfolio beyond the normal demands put upon an academic. As retirement approached, one of the pieces of advice I was given repeatedly, was not to accept the first role I was offered. In practice, I didn’t follow this. I applied for many roles which I didn’t get – rejection does not simply come in the early years of a career – before the Department of Education role turned up, one which I immediately accepted. Looking back, most of the unsuccessful applications would probably have suited me much less well, and could indeed have led to a much more piecemeal combination of roles. Maybe my uncertainty of how some of these roles fitted me individually contributed to my failures. But, I want to stress, failure is not something reserved for the young. It can hit you – and hit you hard – at any stage. It can divert you from where you thought you were going, but nevertheless it will not always be damaging.
The second point to make is, if someone tells you a role takes X amount of time, think hard whether this estimate is realistic. Many years ago, I was told by the outgoing chair of the Royal Society’s Education Committee, the time commitment was four meetings a year. Maybe that was all they did, but I found myself spending more like a day a week – and quite often in London rather than remotely – on the role. In part this was because it was a time of significant change in education policy under Michael Gove, and frequent consultations came out requiring a response. Perhaps I should have limited the time I was prepared to give, but then I would have derived much less satisfaction. That experience told me to treat the advertised SAC chair role as amounting to 4 meetings a year with suspicion. It didn’t worry me, as I was looking for something fulfilling in my retirement, and I have been proved right. The role involves a significant time commitment, with lots of new areas to mug up on (eg getting to grips with SEND and the reforms). Learning new things is, in my mind, always stimulating.
And growing out from that role I have become involved in other education- and skills-related activities. Of my ongoing activities, there is nothing that I can think of that couldn’t be badged under over that overarching umbrella. Yet I cannot claim that I achieved that by a ruthless focus on it, so much as the roles that I have sought and then been offered have all come together under that heading. Giving this past week’s talks highlighting these activities was therefore reassuring to me about coherence.
However…if you feel you’ve ended up with a random collection of tasks on top of your day job (or in retirement) I would reiterate the key point I made in my TEDx talk some years ago. It was not for nothing it was entitled ‘nothing is wasted’. You try something new. You may or may not enjoy it, but if not you will know (as I did about such talks) you never want to do such a thing again. Or you may learn something that comes in useful many years later. That was what I felt about the role chairing the Royal Society’s Education Committee, because knowing something about school education was certainly a help when I became Master of a Cambridge college although, rather obviously, that was neither the motivation nor even in my mind, when I accepted the chair role. And so it goes. In retirement, as in the rest of a career, it is perfectly possible to look back – be it in the small hours of the night or any other time – and think, yes, there is some coherence there after all.
