Kate McCallam
Orginally from Yorkshire, Kate attended the university of St Andrews in Scotland and as a graduate of MFL spent a lot of time in France and Germany - both countries being part of her cultural heritage too. Kate had a successful career in live television production before deciding to enter the family business, gaining QTS on the competitive fast-track Graduate Teacher Programme.
Within education, Kate has held a number of different roles and responsiblities, including those in senior management and leading on teaching and learning. She now works as an education consultant and content writer.
Outside of education, Kate writes commercially and is an ambassador for the creative writing charity, Arvon.
On Writing
When I write I am most in flow. I find writing intrinsically rewarding and I definitely experience a distorted sense of time as the term 'flow' suggests. It's a kind of mindfulness.
I find the act of writing incredibly powerful and stimulating. Writing is an emotional act and the fact that a reader/writer relationship can be created from words on a paper is, for me, pretty wondrous.
I write for lots of reasons: to figure things out, to amuse myself and others, to inform, to teach, to entertain, for the challenge and satisfaction it brings - mostly for the love of it. I wrote diaries from the age of 7 and wrote my first 'novel' at 12 after being inspired by a wonderfully funny and talented English teacher.
I hope to do for other children what he did for me.
On Teaching
The best schools I've worked in have had a busy, chatty staffroom where happy teachers, passionate about their practice and the children they teach, share ideas, successes and failures. I believe that all teachers should be supported to learn and develop both their curriculum knowledge and craft of teaching at every stage of their career.
For me teaching is a lifelong learning endeavour , so I prefer working with colleagues who don't believe they've cracked it because of the number of years under their belt.
As Dylan Williams once said this profession 'takes more than one lifetime to master' and I couldn't agree more.
Teaching is challenging and requires patience, dedication and energy - one minute you're God's gift to teaching, the next it's all gone wrong and you wonder if you're any good at this after all? It's the nature of the beast, but ultimately being a teacher is incredibly rewarding career that allows adults to make a positive contribution to the lives of of young people and society as a whole.