A model school

It would be a cliché to say that Christian Heinrich fell into his career in education. But really, there isn’t any other way of describing his route into teaching. In his final year of a degree in American literature, he returned home to nurse his sick mother. When she passed away, his old prep school headmaster asked him for a coffee. ‘He played that wonderful trick,’ explains Heinrich. ‘He said, “Oh Christian, I’m taking a Latin class, come along.” Midway through the lesson he had to take a phone call. “Christian, just finish the lesson, and then come and find me.” I duly finished things off, and that was that. ‘“When are you going to start?” he then asked.’

Heinrich settled into teaching, meeting on the way his wife Belinda, also a teacher. She agreed to support him for a year while he studied his PGCE, and then both of them headed to Summer Fields school in Oxford. This all-boys, all-boarding school was a highly academic prep school: ‘a bit of a military academy in some ways.’ But ‘we loved it,’ says Heinrich. ‘We had this idyllic community in Oxford, where we taught all day and then had drinks or went to plays in the evening.’ Heinrich progressed through the ranks, becoming a house master at 30. At 38 he was made deputy head. By this point, the couple had four children. ‘It suddenly struck us that there was no way we were going to be able to afford to send them all to senior school.’ He started applying for headmaster jobs.