Dame Rachel De Souza

speaker

518 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 12 May

Dame Rachel De Souza’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Rosebud with Gyles Brandreth · More Rosebud - Dame Rachel De Souza, the Children's Commissioner · 12 May 2026 podcast

But the school where I was a deputy, the school down the road that had been failing forever, was going to become an academy and this academy thing, right?

It was really the early days.

And I went and had a look at it just to have that...

gripping feeling of like I've got to do it everywhere I looked there was failure it's you know I'd been working in this really good school as a deputy and I was like every there were no teachers but I looked at the kids I thought they're great you know we could do this and it was a real turnaround job so how do you turn it around what happens what do you do on day one you well so I mean my day ones because literally I've done you know I did another one then I had 14 schools so turning around failing schools was very much my thing

Yeah, so I had to trust.

So basically I did this one, got it from failing to outstanding.

So I think the first thing, and this always sounds very depressing, but it's the right thing to do, is to be absolutely honest about where you are.

The first thing is, everybody wants to pretend that it's OK or if you just do this or if you just do that.

Actually, there are so many elements that go into running a great school.

And, you know, you have to be honest about your start point and where your gaps are.

Then you know what to do about it.

Then I would throw the rulebook out the window because there is no way doing some...

national strategy or whatever's going to work.

It's not going to work.

Kids haven't had a maths teacher for five years and the football team fight every time they go out.

You know what I mean?

You're dealing with really, really practical things.

So I would literally then get my team.

We are going to go like...

every hour of that first day every minute of that first day of that first the strategy was so detailed and what truly truly needs to happen for example the fighting football team we're going to buy them a new kit we're going to give them a whole load of you know we're going to we're going to talk to them about being winners and we're going to talk to them about how you behave and then we're going to go with them

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