![]() While confronting years of secrecy and telling her family, friends and partner, initially drove her into depression, it has proved a positive move in the long-term. I couldn’t keep on lying on a constant basis.” “I remember looking at myself in the mirror and thinking to myself, ‘I can’t carry on pretending for the rest of my life.’ I don’t think it was me saying to myself that I had to be a woman from now on, it was more that I couldn’t keep it a secret any more. One of the things that motivated her to stand for its council - and later IfL president - was her decision, in 2008, to ‘come out’ in women’s clothing. Groves set up the Association of Part Time Tutors (APTT) in 1995 and (while admitting to being a “former sceptic”), joined the IfL a decade later – just before membership became compulsory on the basis that “it was better to be looking out than looking in.” I couldn’t carry on pretending for the rest of my life” Having been picked on constantly at school for being ‘different,’ Groves learnt that education didn’t necessarily have to be “hostile” and that – much to her surprise – people were actually interested in what she had to stay.Įvening classes in music appreciation led to a teaching qualification at North Tyneside College, and by the middle of the 1990s, Groves had a string of qualifications (including a first class degree in education and philosophy) and a flourishing portfolio career in teaching, which typically meant juggling at least half a dozen contracts at different institutions, at any one time. “It’s a bit like knowing you are left-handed but someone has told you to be right-handed and you’re scared to use your left hand so you carry on using your right until it gets to the point where it’s driving you crazy,” she says.ĭiscovering the Workers Educational Association (WEA) - the UK’s largest voluntary-sector provider of adult education - helped enormously. ![]() Born male, but having felt, since childhood, that she was meant to be female, Groves had started dressing as a woman in secret, but the pretence was starting to take its toll. “But that wasn’t the case at all no matter how well-qualified you were it didn’t mean you were immune from unemployment.”Īt the same time, she was struggling with issues in her personal life. “I always assumed, as I was always told at school, that if I got my O levels, I’d be fine,” she recalls. While she was determined not to fall into the trap of “getting up late, swanning around the house and going back to bed again,” the experience was dispiriting. The DHSS was one of the biggest employers on the Tyneside estate where she lived, and besides - having not enjoyed school - the idea of continuing her education seemed like “a ridiculously stupid idea.”īut being laid off by the civil service in the mid 1980s, and becoming one of “Mrs Thatcher’s great four million,” unemployed, came as a shock and Groves spent the next five years in and out (and it was mostly out) of work. While she hated working at the local social security office, updating national insurance records and authorising benefit payments, there was no question of changing path. ![]() Despite doing well in her O levels, she left as soon she as she could, joining the civil service as a record branch clerk. She came to the profession late, having “absolutely detested” the Catholic single sex secondary school she attended, where discipline ruled. “I did it all back to front, upside-down and mostly part-time,” says Institute for Learning (IfL) president Beatrix Groves, known to friends as Bea, on how she ended up with a degree and a career in teaching.
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