St John Fisher Catholic High School

I was a pupil in this AWFUL place between 1961 and 1965.
I hated every moment of my time there and left just after my fifteenth birthday.
I had almost no education at all, the only thing I could do was to mumble the latin Mass and wail the hymns, because if we did not participate in these rituals we would be beaten.
I was destined to be a carpenter.
Friday morning was my woodwork class in my last year.
Every Friday morning, this class was cancelled so we could indulge the parish priest and our headmaster with yet another Mass!
In that last few months of what was supposed to be the most important time of my schooling, the time to equip me with the necessary skills for my chosen profession , these awful people wasted the opportunity to do something they were supposed to be doing and I finally escaped in June 1965.
As we left, our headmaster stood at the classroom door And shook all our hands with some parting words.
To me he said, “never mind Xxxxxx, there will always be jobs for roadsweepers!”
He had a big smirk on his face when he said this to me and similar things to many other boys as we filed past him.
I had asked for a reference from my woodwork teacher to help me get a job as a carpenter.
He heard of my request and insisted on writing it himself.
The woodwork teacher who I got on well with decided to write one for me anyway.
The first job I applied for, I did not get.
The employer showed me the headmaster’s reference.
It stated that I was ignorant, lazy and would never amount to anything.
Thankfully my other reference said different and I did get an apprenticeship.
At the age of 25 I emigrated to Sydney and eventually found myself in night school (a good place to meet new friends) where I completed my “O” and “A” levels equivalents, went to University and obtained a good honours degree in Biology and a diploma in teaching which became my profession for the next thirty years.
Not bad for a “road sweeper”!
And along the way, all of that religious hymn singing crap was dumped.
And I have done my best to encourage all the youths who passed through my hands to ignore it too.
And they all got a decent education, something that St John Fisher RC school in Peterborough with its unqualified staff and its twisted headmaster was incapable of doing for me and my friends all those years ago!

bit of a shithole i canny lie. no social distancing. education is shit. teachers don’t care for mental health, apart from miss meagher, she’s a legend still.