Richard Rieser: Teaching

Transcript

So I started teaching in colleges, general studies apprentices and stuff like that, which was quite easy for me. And then I thought, I don’t want to do this, I’ll go and train as a schoolteacher, and I was living in Hackney then with my first wife, we had a flat. So I ended up at a school in Hackney, Hackney Downs, where Harold Pinter went and a number of other people, which it had been just three years since it had been a grammar school, it was a comprehensive. And the head teacher, a guy called John Kemp, seemed to be quite happy to take people like me, he knew I was a radical, but he thought I was probably quite interesting so he took me on strength really as a geography teacher. And within a year I was the school rep, and there was 60 members, and the year after that we were organising strikes.

There was no concessions made for me as a disabled person in the great ILEA which was the champion of equal opportunities, in fact they was why Mrs Thatcher in the end shut it down, because of its championing of equal opportunities. But for disability, and as a disabled teacher, there was nothing.

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