Here at Smestow Academy, we are grateful for the service that our staff provide to our pupils and the wider community. We are incredibly proud and grateful for Mr Thomas, who celebrates his 30th year of teaching here at Smestow. To honour this, we asked him to put his thoughts down on the changes he has seen over the years.

I suspect that the last few weeks of the Summer Term 2025 are the closest that I will ever get to experiencing actual time travel…

There are two reasons for this.

The first was Sports Day. The world of sport isn’t my natural habitat, but on this day I found myself watching not only the student competitors, but also the spectating staff and the other students sitting at the side of the track cheering on their peers. There was that healthy air of competition, the sun was out and I caught myself thinking ‘Yes! This is what Sports Day at Smestow used to feel like!’ The sporting events were the same but the climate had changed and I don’t mean the weather. There was a real sense of ‘community’ and, dare I say it, that everyone was actually enjoying themselves…

I had the same feeling during the GCSEs and Year 10 mock exams. Something had changed. In (recent) times past it had sometimes felt like dragging bags of sand over broken glass to prepare students for their exams. This exam season it felt like all students wanted to achieve success. Form time revision sessions, lessons during the day and after school study sessions meant that sometimes I would see students four hours in one day. The English class that I taught rose to this challenge.

I realised that actually this wasn’t a return to what Smestow used to be like. This was something new. This was Smestow, but better.

This was the ‘cultural shift’ that Matrix had set their sights on when they took over Smestow two years ago. The staff at the time knew that this shift was long overdue, but, like myself, probably felt like the Egyptian workforce, standing next to those massive stone hued blocks, being shown the blueprints for the pyramids;

Worker: You want us to do what?

Boss: We’re going to build this. Trust us. It will work.

Worker: (looking at the massive stone block) Okay… Let’s do it.

I am honoured to have been part of a staff who have risen to this challenge. It has happened, it has happened fast and it feels secure.

I’ve never been ‘nostalgic’ or ever really ‘pined for the old days’ of Smestow. Teaching moves too fast to allow for that. The annual new student intake, new classes, new initiatives, refined curriculums and modified exam content has kept this job fresh and interesting for me for 30 years.

I was head of English at Smestow for twelve years, managing an excellent team of nine staff (some of whom I had taught while they were students at Smestow!). I was a member of SLT for six years, but it was during the more ‘troubled times’ of the school that made me choose to return to my ‘second love’ of full-time classroom teaching – which allowed me to spend more quality time with my ‘first love’, Mrs Thomas!

On a purely selfish note, I have absolutely loved my job for the past 30 years. In an interview I gave for the Times Educational Supplement (name drop…) I shamelessly expressed how my accountant and city trader peers might have had the expensive sports cars (which they never seemed to have time to actually drive) but were jealous of my smug job satisfaction and stories of the classroom.

It’s true. In which other job could you write, direct and produce your own theatre production (two, in fact, in my first years as a newly qualified teacher at Smestow – just add half a dozen willing sixth form actors and an enthusiastic behind-the-scenes-crew)? In what other job could you be asked to ‘step in’ and lead a ‘Camps International’ group of eighteen year 11 and 13 students to Peru? For a MONTH? An incredible experience, supporting local communities in building much needed primary schools and health centres – before a five day hike of the Inca Trail through the Andes and indulge my childhood ‘Indiana Jones’ fantasies by visiting Machu Picchu.

Support a Turing Scheme trip to Marrakesh for a week? Count me in. A job that has allowed me to indulge my love of travel – but, more importantly, see young people in absolute awe of new places and new experiences. You can keep your ‘office job’.

But if you ask me what has kept me turning up at Smestow every day for the past 30 years, besides starting every day off by parking my car next to the spectacular views of bright green playing fields which roll down to the canal, backed by the thick trees climbing up to Wightwick bank?

Stories.

Reading them mainly. Out loud. In a classroom or in an assembly. With voices. Lots of different voices.

It sounds cliché, but, for me it’s a ‘magic’ that never grows old. I just love reading to students and feeling them getting ‘pulled in’ (like a ‘tractor beam’ from Star Wars). Exotic trips aside(!), there is genuinely only one reason that I do this job and that is to give young people the opportunity to try to achieve some success that will give them CHOICE in their own lives (and English is one of the BIG keys on the keychain to facilitate this). I have been honoured in supporting young people to create their own (life) stories and it has been a privilege to have been part of Smestow Academy’s continuing story.

Congratulations Mr Thomas and thank you for all you have done for staff and pupils, past and present here at Smestow Academy.