#25: You Can Do It with Susan Baragwanath

Tania Cotton: Welcome to the LifeWise Show where we explore the things in life that make you feel truly alive. Today I'm in conversation with Susan Baragwanath, a remarkable woman who has spent her life quietly yet with unshakeable determination, challenging one of society's most dangerous beliefs. The idea that there is them and us, those who deserve a good education and those who do not. At the heart of Susan's work is a profound understanding that human potential is deeply affected by context. By the environment we are born into and the opportunities we are given and whether someone truly sees us. She has dedicated her life to proving that every human being, regardless of background or circumstance, carries gifts, intelligence, and human potential waiting to be unlocked. Susan is also the visionary behind the Women's Leadership Conference in Geneva, a gathering that brings together extraordinary women committed to creating meaningful change in the world. I've had the privilege of running MovementWise workshops at this conference for several years and today I'm here with Susan in the mountains of Switzerland where we're spending three days together doing a Total Body Reset as Susan prepares to enter her 80th year - something almost most impossible to believe when you meet this vibrant, courageous and deeply committed woman. Susan began her teaching career in New Zealand and then went on to work at very prestigious schools in Geneva and France, educating highly privileged young people expected to move on to the world's top universities and influential careers. But something deeper was calling her. Returning to New Zealand, she accepted what many would have seen as an impossible challenge. Working in Cannons Creek, one of New Zealand's poorest communities where overcrowding poverty, inequality, physical and sexual abuse deeply affected the lives of young people, particularly young Polynesian women. There, Susan witnessed teenage girls disappearing from the education system because they had become mothers. Rather than accepting this as inevitable, she challenged the system itself. Driven by a relentless determination and an unshakable belief in human potential, Susan founded the first school for teenage mothers, a place of dignity, opportunity and hope. Along the way, she has attracted extraordinary people to support her in her vision of helping young women written off by society to discover their value, their voice, and their future. Today's conversation is about leading with courage and compassion and what becomes possible when one person refuses to look away. Welcome, Susan.

Susan Baragwanath: Thank you, Tania, for having me. I'm delighted to be here and thank you for looking after me.

Tania Cotton: Well, the first theme I would like to explore is actually context and how the context of our lives can really open up or close down opportunities within our life. And if we can begin with the context of your life, before these three days we spent together, I had assumed that you had had a burning desire to be a teacher, but in fact, really looking around in your home, I've seen wall hangings, pictures and Chinese kimono prints and I realise that actually textiles is something you have a passion for. I then discover that given half a chance that is perhaps what you would have liked to have done. So why didn't you begin with that?

Susan Baragwanath: Well, as you said, I'm nearly 80 and although the New Zealand woman got the vote in 1894, it is the first in the world, I think. When I was at school and graduating in the '60s, there really were only two professions open to us and that was to be a teacher or a nurse. An odd one would perhaps I remember one of my fellow students doing law, but it was a very long and arduous process. And once we got the job, we weren't expected to finish it because children would come along. So the idea was that we'd do something until we found a husband and had our own family and so that was the expectation. That changed very drastically a few years later. That's no longer the case, of course, or throughout the world, but even in New Zealand with the vote, it was still lingered, if you like, in the household. And it was my headmistress that stopped me from doing studying textiles, not that there was a course at the university, but I could have studied home science, but she seemed to think that my brain could do a bit more than that, called my father in and the next minute I was doing a degree in geography. So I started off as doing geography and becoming a geography teacher.

Tania Cotton: You went on to teach really some of the students at the top of the socioeconomic and educational tree who really were expected to pass exams, be successful students and get accepted to whatever university course they wanted in the world. So that was really quite contrary to the context of your life.

Susan Baragwanath: Well, I actually loved teaching and probably I was always going to be a teacher. Maybe if I'd studied textiles, I might have taught textiles, but opportunities came my way and I became a teacher of the International Baccalaureate and I also became an examiner and I loved it. The wonderful thing about these prestigious schools is that you usually have students who want to learn very supportive parents and no barriers for them reaching the top of their potential. And when I look back at some of my students in that era, I'm terribly proud. I see their names in newspapers and pictures and very fancy magazines and so on. And I think if you're born into families like that with an emphasis on education, you can go anywhere and do anything. What happened, of course, was I went back to New Zealand and I was never going to get a job in a good school like that. There was too much competition and I'd been out of the country for a very long time. I had to start right at the bottom and as you said, I went to Cannons Creek, which is a very, very poor area of a city called North of Wellington.

Tania Cotton: And you talked about there being no barriers for children from very privileged families and when you find yourself then with a very high population of Polynesian children who come from difficult backgrounds, can you describe some of the barriers that there was for them?

Susan Baragwanath: Well, one of the barriers was me. I had no idea. I'd been brought up as a child in New Zealand, but I went to work in a place that I had no specialisation and I had no idea of the different cultures and the different customs and the way the system worked in impoverished areas if it works at all. I struggled for the first two or three years trying to understand why people did things the way that they did and I could not understand why the students in the school that I went to, where I was an assistant principal, I just couldn't understand that they were not succeeding. We had science labs, we had classrooms, they weren't very fancy. I taught in schools that didn't have particularly fancy buildings. The buildings at the school were quite good, but they didn't serve any lunch, not until 2019, which was nearly more than 30 years later. And the parents of the children that I was teaching had come from Pacific Islands or the poorer areas of New Zealand to work in factories and by the time I got there in the 1990s, the beginning of 1990s, they had lost their jobs because a lot of the work that they did was taken over by the Japanese and then the Chinese and so on. So people that didn't have much education for themselves yet wanted a future for their children had moved to this place which didn't provide them with what they needed and wanted and their children desperately needed. So it was an impoverished area that I didn't ever think would exist in New Zealand.

Tania Cotton: I hear really that there are two barriers that you're presenting there that really hit me. First is really a general ignorance in New Zealand and in the world of the cultural richness, but also challenges of the populations living around New Zealand and coming from the islands. So there was no awareness of how these talented, incredible people were really being shut down on being able to live life fully and have basic needs met from something as basic as having food to eat. And if we don't have food to eat, that changes our whole ability to concentrate, to thrive, to in fact to live. And what for you did you see as part of the challenge when people don't have something as basic as enough food?

Susan Baragwanath: Well, you can't teach a hungry child. So if a child comes to school having not had breakfast, probably not having dinner the night before and is only going to get fed on one day when the parents get a state benefit, then the problems of the society are going to all end up on the child because the child doesn't understand and when the science master would say, "Righto, sit up straight and I'm going to teach you how to do this, it's not going to work. Somebody's going to be so hungry or so angry or so upset he's going to disrupt the person next to him or next to her and off it goes. So for the first three years in that job, I just ran from one fire to another one trying to do what I could. For example, the health system wasn't very good either. You had to pay to go to the doctor and you had to pay for medication and people coming from the islands sometimes used island medicine, which is fine and there's plenty of place for that, but this is New Zealand and it's cold weather, the whole environment is different. So it's really just being deprived of so many things that the education just wasn't there yet I knew that I could teach those children if they were properly looked after, but I couldn't teach 800 of them because that's how many there were in the school. I suppose in the end, after this three years of running ragged, I thought, who is the most needy and who could I actually help? And it was the teen mother who got kicked out of the school and if you don't save the teenage mother, then her children are going to be as deprived if not more, because she's going to just keep having children to get more money out of the state in a bigger house and usually $10 a week for the dog to guard the house. So it becomes a spiral, but it wasn't that actually. It was the fact that New Zealand's got laws and we are all obliged to follow them and the law says very simply every child to the age of 19 is entitled to a free basic formal education and that was it. And I believed it and I thought, right, I'm going to do something about it because people are not obeying the law and yet if I went over 55 miles an hour in a 50 zone, I'd get a fine and have to pay for it. So I suppose it was anger.

Tania Cotton: Yes. And it's interesting that teenage girls were falling pregnant. Tell me, was it not in the first week at that school that you abruptly started to learn or had an incident that really woke you up to that this was going on and that this was a real problem?

Susan Baragwanath: Yes. I didn't know it was a widespread problem, but in the first few weeks that I was at the Porirua College where I was teaching, I found a girl age 14 having a baby in the toilets. And when I asked for the ambulance to come, the ambulance was otherwise occupied because we were quite a long way from the town center. So, I took her in my car to the local doctor's surgery, but it was a young doctor and he took one look at her and he said," I'm not going to deliver this baby because she was so young, she was 14, you have to take her immediately to the hospital. So I drove her to the hospital and I got to the hospital and the reception said," Well, what's her name and how old is she? "And I had no idea. I mean, I didn't know the girl. There were 800 or 400 girls in school. I had absolutely no idea. So that was difficult. And then I had to hang around until the baby came. And then one of my colleagues who was the guidance counsellor, he said," Well, now you have to go home and tell her mother. "And the mother was 33 I remember and to tell a lady who'd come from Samoa that she was now a grandmother, she didn't take it well.

Tania Cotton: Yeah. So having read your incredible book, The Red Cross, and some of the details in there of you found a young girl in Labour, but I mean really in Labour. Oh yes. Just tell us what that was like and then really making it real is what was actually the response of the mother when she learnt about it

Susan Baragwanath: Well my car was very messy even though my colleague had put a plastic bag in the front seat, that was not enough to support the upholstery sadly. The mother was absolutely furious. She abused me. She kept kicking at her door rather than me, which was probably a good thing, but my colleague had phoned the district nurse who were quite active in the area and she turned up and took over from this angry, angry woman, but the mother refused to accept what had happened to her 14 year old daughter and refused to have her home. So social welfare took over. But then I was called again because there was nobody that would take the young girl and her baby to a charity home. So I had to drive her to a charity home, which was quite a long way and I hadn't been in New Zealand very long at that time. I had no idea where we were going and both the mother and the child screamed all the way. So it was a bit of a rude awakening.

Tania Cotton: Yes. And in your book, if I can quote, it says the response of the girl's mother was, " I'm going to give that stupid bitch the bash. " Yes, she did. And that the episode, as you said, didn't end well. The girl and the baby were no longer welcome in the family home. So a young girl not only fell pregnant, was found sobbing in the toilets, had to deal with a major life event as I understand it, there was a lot of physical and sexual abuse that you were having to deal with, which were perhaps symptoms of people struggling with not having their basic needs met and perhaps self-medicating with alcohol, drugs.

Susan Baragwanath: Yes, definitely. It's tragic when a community is being built on economic good times and when those times go, there was no safety net at that time. It's improved a bit now, but even the feeding children in schools in New Zealand, it didn't happen until 2019. And even now, this is 2026 we're up for an election later in the year and there is debate over that, whether it should be 'food for all'.

Tania Cotton: So your greatest of all frustrations was trying to keep teenage mothers in school and meanwhile, you had two boys of your own at home. You were a single mother who was trying to support them as well as trying to find solutions for those young girls and your role as a teacher really seemed to shift from one of teaching to actually just health and welfare.

Susan Baragwanath: Oh yes, it wasn't a teaching job at all. I was hired as an assistant principal to look after the girls and there were 400 girls. But I couldn't stop just with the girls because if somebody got scabies, for example, it's not going to just hit the girls, it's going to hit the boys as well and there were other health issues, but you can't ... I couldn't tackle it all. First of all, I wasn't the boss of the school, but the boss of the school, he was having trouble coping himself, and my colleagues who were trying to run a proper academic curriculum. Everyone was struggling and to expect those students to be on the same level playing field as the schools that my own children were in, because we lived in an affluent area and we had family to help us and so on. It's an ambition that's not going to be met under any circumstances really if you don't look after your poorest and your most needy. And one of the big problems was that the government somewhere along the line had lost sight of what was happening and when I presented information to them, they didn't want to know because if you present a problem then they have to try and find a solution to it. I was really determined to do something about the teenage mother because she was only going to have more children by the time she was 21 and if she did that, then she would be a state beneficiary for the rest of her life and New Zealand's a welfare state. We just can't afford it. Economics was quite important as well.

Tania Cotton: So I'd love to explore now how you reached out to, well, fellowships that ended up really enabling you to understand that this wasn't just a problem in New Zealand.

Susan Baragwanath: Yes, I was not qualified for this job. I was qualified to be a geography teacher and then I did educational administration. So I was qualified to run a school. I was not qualified to deal with need in what I was seeing. So I thought people could help me. I thought somebody must be doing it better. And I went to see the professor, the guru, if you like, of the dean of education at the University of Wellington and I gave him some statistics and he read them and then he stood up and opened the door for me to leave and I'd only been there four minutes. I thought I'm not going anywhere until he tells me what I should do. And he was very good because I think he just wanted to get on frankly, but he said, "You need to find out if anybody else is having these problems." And I said, "How do I do that? " And he said, "You write to all the schools in New Zealand." There were only 365 secondary schools, I think at the time, more or less, and ask them if they're having problems with at risk students. The pregnant girls were only part of a whole group of people who were at risk. And so I did that. My boss was extremely happy. He said, "Well, at least someone's trying to do something." He gave me $200 for some stamps and I wrote letters to all the schools in New Zealand and within five days I got 115 replies. So a third of all schools said, "We've got problems too." So we ran a conference and from that conference, and this is not just me, I have to say other people took it over. We did account around the country and assistant principals and principals from all over New Zealand counted how many children they actually had that were in that category of at risk and there were 20%. So one in five across country was experiencing what I was saying. Now we had a whole school full of them, which means that the good schools where my own children were, probably had very few, but one in five was a lot of risk, a lot of children and there were about 350,000 students I think in New Zealand at that time in the high schools. And from that I thought, well, I'm going to stick at this, but I have to get someone to help me to manage. And that's when I looked and I decided that if nobody in New Zealand could help me, then I had to go abroad. I was very fortunate to get an Eisenhower Fellowship and I was also a Commonwealth fellow to the University of London and I took a year off and in America I went to 56 schools across 12 states and in Britain I learned that they didn't actually know what to do with their teenage mothers, but I had enough help at the end of that year to go back and say, "Okay, I can do this. I know basically how it works, but I don't know how to start." And it just so happened that very soon after I arrived back, the visiting teacher who was a teacher who went into homes when kids were training, she came to see me and she said, "One of your former students who I didn't remember at all has had a baby and wants to see you. " And so I went and did a home visit and once I got there, I realised the child was down syndrome. The mom was 16, the boyfriend and the father of the child was 15 and she said, "Very simply, I want to come back to school." And I said, "Okay, well I know how to do it, but we just have to work together because you're going to have to help me. " And she said, "What do you need?" And I said, "I need to know who's around, who else is in your situation and let's start from there." So we started one day a week and then three days a week and then it got so big the student said we want our own school, so we had to find other premises and it went from there really.

Susan Baragwanath: So her baby is called Aroha, Maori for love. And the name of the student was Lania and she is from Tokolao and I think there's some Samoa in there too and the father was Maori. She had dropped out of school and she'd gone to an alternative school and met the boyfriend there and they had got together and he was very supportive. And his dad had been a school teacher. He was an older man, but his dad had been a school teacher and he was extremely supportive. And Lania had not probably been to proper school since she had been from the age of probably about 12 because her mom worked, he father was in Samoa from what I remember and mom had not only two jobs but she played housey in the afternoon, Tombola one of those games. And so Lania had responsibilities as a parent and she had two younger sisters. So while we might think that a student that's fallen out of school has no skills, she most certainly did have, and a lot of her friends did as well because they were in charge of running a household and she would take the children to kindergarten and to the doctor and so on. So she actually had a very structured life. When I met her, she had moved into her own home, just turned 17 and was managing to pay power bills and other rental and so on.

Tania Cotton: And I love the way in your book you describe actually the value of that informal education that a lot of those girls had. And then you described also your two sons with their classical education probably barely knew how to run a bath and how are these girls actually running a household. And I think this is key because the most important point you make is these girls and these children were not stupid. They just lacked opportunity and support and an education that was by right their law. So it was a human rights issue really.

Susan Baragwanath: Very much so. Yes. Yes. And fast forward, we did move. We moved away from the college because it was quite a religious community and a teenage mother was looked down on. I mean, actually the rate of teenage mothering or parenting whatever had not changed since the '70s. It's not as if there was a whole raft of teenage mothers, but the dynamic of society had changed and so the state would give the student who was over 16 a benefit. If they were under 16, then they'd have to go into care or something like that. Lania, it sounds like, was a real catalyst. Having yourself just come back from looking at 56 schools around the US supported by the Eisenhower Fellowship, you then saw the kinds of things that really worked. Could you describe the things that then opened your eyes to these are the things that are important? For example, children need food. That was one. What were some of the other things?

Susan Baragwanath: Oh, they need food and they need to bring their children too. And that was the big draw card. I served lunch. It wasn't that good a lunch, but it was lunch. And so our first school started in a big room, which would almost be condemned. It was in a building that was quite damp and it was on the dark side. It was not a pleasant place, but we had toys at one end and desks and chairs for students at the other and in the middle we had food and that was it. Somebody in America had said to me, "Don't try and split these mums and children up. They need to come to school." Well, of course it was like a zoo until we got a bit more organised, you really couldn't teach them anything other than social skills and things like that. But over time the students really worked out among themselves because Lania, so I discovered, had lots of friends in the same position. So they worked out a roster where two of them would look after children at one end and the ones at the other end would end up making something. Textiles came into the school. I used to ask all my friends, "What can you do to help me to give these young people something to do? " And they weren't all women. I got a boy. He came in, he'd been abandoned with a baby and he came to the school for a while until his parents could no longer cope and he was sent up the line to family. But it was not me driving it actually, it was the students. I knew how to do it. I knew what I could do, which is provide food and a place to come, but Lania and her friends provided everything else.

Tania Cotton: It seems to me that Lania created a culture of ownership and responsibility amongst her friends, realising that if they didn't take responsibility, then their lives were going to be really held back. And so rather than waiting for everything just to be done for them, they really stepped in and were quite proactive in building and enabling environment where they knew that they would be able to thrive and not just rest in this horrible atmosphere of merely surviving?

Susan Baragwanath: That's right. And they were pretty demanding. First of all, they said, "Well, why can't we come to school every day?" Well, it was expensive because we had to pay transport to get them there. We want lunch every day. That was expensive. I was leaning on quite a few of my friends to put money in the pot and then they said, "Well, really we need our own school." Now I'm still in the job that I was originally hired to do so I had to farm a bit of that out and we were running a school inside a school if you like and that's when the political machine stepped in. I had remarried after 10 years I met my future husband and he was well connected in the community and he introduced me to a former prime minister who was very, very nice and happened to ask me what I was doing with my life and I told him and I also told him that I'd just been sacked because the Ministry of Education did not like what we were doing at all. It was a precedent and they didn't like it and here was some upstart from this impoverished area who was doing something that you're not allowed to do under the law. Nobody can start a school, a state school and expect to be paid, but this ex- prime minister was wonderful and he said, "Well, you really need to write this down and send it to the top 20 politicians across the parties because New Zealand has a very short cycle. We have a three years, so either you're in a new cycle or you're coming up and they're all wanting to get votes and we just struck it lucky really because the current government wanted to get reelected and immediately the press got interested and a journalist came out to see us and with those two things going on, we were able to go around these policy analysts or the people that were saying it couldn't be done, it shouldn't be done, we're going to take your job away, that sort of thing. I had people on the top side saying, Hello, hang on. These girls are learning. Some of them want to do some exams. They're making a bit of publicity. It doesn't look good for me if I'm not reelected, so let's see what we can do. So we chopped out the middle man really. You've got to remember, this is the 1990s, New Zealand, there were not many good news stories at the time and from the drama room we went to a shop. I just used shop in the center of Cannons Creek, but instantly it was full. And so the shop was quite short lived, but we invited everybody or anybody who was important. And for example, the Governor General of New Zealand came to one of the prize givings. That's pretty big stuff. And if a politician came, we'd make sure he got his photo on the local paper and then we needed more space and by this time members of the wider community became interested and I was so lucky to get a retired former Secretary of Justice, a real live Mandarin who used to work in government service 41 years actually and he was not only a good man, he had a very, very clever wife and he had good connections with the licensing trust and in the days of those early days of New Zealand, they would build taverns with six or seven bars because you had to stop drinking at six o'clock. It was called the six o'clock swill and to get all those people after work in to keep these bars going, they needed the space. By the time we got there, there was only one bar working out of seven, but my bar, the old wagoner's bar, was huge and it had been moth board for about 20 years and we were able to get that from the licensing trust for free. So by that time the number that our students that I had was up to 50 and yeah, that was another story and it wasn't really until they sold the tavern that we finally got a purpose built school, but that took 14 years in total from the time I'd started.

Tania Cotton: And that tavern or your bar, it's interesting you got it and it was in a terrible state. In your book, you described the state of the toilets, which were quite disgusting and that there was community service for women who rather than send them to jail, that was their punishment if you like. And they came along and cleaned those toilets, but your girls really understood their challenges and really looked after them., that they did such a great job of cleaning those toilets and they looked after each other. There was this compassionate relationship between them that I think is so important because they both in a way, it sounded like, understood each other's struggles to a point where at the end you requested that they didn't serve any more time or were not sent to jail for anything because actually you understood the challenge of their life.

Susan Baragwanath: Yes. Well, for all I know, nobody ever told me who they were exactly, but they were probably cousins or aunties because they were from our direct community, excuse me. But the other thing was that the gangs, wherever you get deprived communities, you have gangs and they're quite understandable because the gang will take over protection. They'll take over if someone dies, they'll arrange for a funeral and pay for it. While sometimes they're not always, not often on the side of the law, I can see why gangs flourish in certain areas and luckily we had protection or I had protection. My car was never touched, for example. I could leave it open outside and nobody would ever touch it because I taught the children from the gangs, not all of them, of course. So that I suppose that protection takes the place of police. There were not many policemen around our area. They were lovely, but they couldn't cope because they didn't have enough funding and so on. And also in my school, people generally hated the police. That was the idea that the police were going to find them for driving a car with no registration or lock them up if they were drunk in charge or something. One day a young police woman walked in to the bar and I wouldn't let her go. She stayed for years on and off because she was, first of all, she was Polynesian. She was Mauri and she knew what life was like and they finally accepted her for what she was, the law, and two of them went to the police college at least two more probably, but she nurtured them to the extent that they not only liked the police, they were the police, they became the police. Yeah, the community was terribly important.

Tania Cotton: And what really resonated with me is how you used a practical education for this community and the importance of arts and creativity.

Susan Baragwanath: Well, the thing about the Eisenhower Fellowship is that they wanted you to have a work life balance, which I had never really thought about. I mean, I had two kids and so a mum driving kids to soccer and football and whatever they did, you're quite busy if you've got a job yourself and you have to clean your windows and do all those other normal things. But when you're travelling and you're so involved in the subject that you're meant to be studying and someone's paying for you to do it, you can lose sight and it can be very lonely, but also you need to develop that part of you. Some people would go for very long walks or some people would go to museums, but I'd always been interested in the social aspect of patchwork and making things - the fiber arts, I suppose. And I had taken a class years ago and I enjoyed doing it and somehow you can make things that not only look good but you feel good because you can actually finish. For example, a patchwork quilt, if you can sew a straight line, you can make something that's really lovely. And so I started with that. I had very good advice from the former head of education in New Zealand, the man actually that was responsible for my generation having a very good education. And he said to me, I was worried about the academic subjects and he said, "Look, don't worry immediately about English and mathematics, try and get some sort of arts and crafts going. " So that's when I went to the Patchwork Guild of Wellington and said, "Would anybody be interested in coming out and helping me? " And of course I'd have old grandmas, but I don't know how many grandmas you know, but all mine have been really strict and you have to do what you're told and so on. And these were old grandmas, actually great grandmas probably to a lot of my students, but once they got through that, what would you call it more grumpiness maybe they had kindness itself and one of those artsy, craftsy ladies was a former accountant, retired accountant and she taught mathematics through patchwork squares and circles and triangles and we called it the mathematics riot because at that stage I was giving them pages of sums to do a bit of long division and a bit of addition and they said, "No, no, we don't like that. We like Lynn's mathematics." And suddenly everyone was keen to learn mathematics, geometry and all the rest of it. So those women, while it was arts and crafts, it grew into something that was much more important. And I got a retired teacher from Porirua College. I knew him and he said, "I'm only coming for seven months until I'm 65." And then of course he'd go onto his state pension, but he was retiring for the sole reason that he was deaf. He was having too much trouble in a classroom and also while my students were being looked after with food and so on, his weren't because I couldn't feed the whole 800. So anyway, he came and he didn't leave, but he said, "The way that we're going to get these young people to come out of their shell is to get them to write." And so he handed it to me first. He said, instead of asking questions also we had to remember that we weren't social workers so we didn't actually want to know or could deal with their social welfare problems. So I would ask them to write me their story but to change the sex of their child and a few, give themselves another name and so on. And actually that would keep them busy for at least a week, sometimes longer. And then every morning he would ask all the students to do 10 minute writing and he'd start by saying, "What was the weather like when you came to school?" But of course a few months later he'd bring a spring of mint in and say, "Right, 10 minutes on the smell of mint or walking in the leaves and the crunch of leaves or I want you to bring a character in. " And I mean I don't have any idea of how to teach English He was a specialist and so suddenly there was an outpouring of creativity from a quarter that I wouldn't have thought could exist. I mean the curriculum, yes, and learning about a Shakespearean play, but I had never really thought about express self-expression in the way that he did.

Tania Cotton: Yes. And I've always had a belief and experience in my medical world, if you like, working in hospitals and working in health, that lack of self-expression leads to depression and how important self-expression is. And you took that even further because they had their 10 minute writing exercise, you got them to write their stories, changing the sex of their child and their own name and you took time out one by one to listen to their stories so that you created that relationship with them and not only about the stories but life in general. So you actually allowed them to really feel listened to, seen and understood.

Susan Baragwanath: Yes. There's a wonderful book written by Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and what I discovered was it's really important to praise young people. It doesn't matter whether the praise is on a green piece of paper which says well done or this is a certificate for good work or you're wonderful, you're excellent, something like that. The important thing that if you're writing, if a young person's writing, they need to be able to express themselves. First of all, they don't want to be yelled at and say their grammar's wrong, because most of the grammar in these stories were wrong, but at some point somebody asked us to publish those stories, the original story of their own life. And so I would ask a student to stay behind. Of course, some of it was very traumatic and there were lots of tears because when there's a disclosure, particularly of something awful, you don't actually want to relive that. That's not for a teacher, it's for the social services. But what I discovered was that most of the students, if not all of them, were able to leave some of that behind. It was a baggage, and actually Lania would say as the years went by because she never left us, she would say, "Right, anybody who's got a problem at home or a family problem or something, do not bring it into the school room. You leave it at the shops when you get off the bus or you walk up the hill, pick it up again at three o'clock in the afternoon, but don't bring it in. " And we had all sorts of little tricks of how to leave those problems behind because a lot of the students initially, particularly the older ones, were drug addicts. They'd be having four or five spots a day of cannabis oil. So it was very, very difficult for them, but after a while they would become so enthusiastic about learning in an environment where they were praised. I mean, there was never any yelling saying, "You're an awful person," or it just didn't happen. And of course, if you go into that environment where not only you're welcome but you've got a good lunch and somebody might make you a scone for morning tea, you're going to rise to that standard. You're not going to be out the back door having a puff of cannabis to keep going for the rest of the day. You don't need it. You're getting it inside.

Tania Cotton: There seems to be something about, because you did read their stories and you did speak to them one by one, do you think it was because they felt accepted? You talk about how it was a revelation that once their stories were on paper, they seemed to be able to move on, leaving some of their bad things behind, like there was a sense of freedom and lightness of being listened to and feeling understood without you having to then just the fact that they were able to express it on paper and feel heard. It seems that I think this is really important for everybody.

Susan Baragwanath: Yes, because we were publishing those stories, they needed to be in a proper readable form and they would go out to the wider community. So that would be one of the reasons it was purely prob Practical on my part. I had to have a sentence, for example. It had to be structured and if there was something that didn't quite match. So in a way it was technical, but I'd type it up while they talked to me and then I'd give them the story to read to make sure that they're happy with it as well. Of course they weren't identifiable and now when I read the book of stories, I can't remember actually what the real names are, which is good, but it's like getting a book published. Oh gosh, I've done that. Or like cleaning a cupboard out and it's tidy. I've done that. You were able to say, "Okay, I'm onto the next thing." And by that time we were having such success in the academic part of the school because if I hadn't had good academic results, it would not have lasted. They'd have said, "Oh, it's an activity center and people aren't achieving really very much." But once we started passing, the students started passing national exams with very high marks, then people took notice and I had this tamed journalist who of course would ring me every five minutes practically to say, "What have they done now? What can I write about? " And they were winning prizes all over the shop by 1999, 2000, 2001. They were winning scholarships to go to university. They were winning all sorts of grants that would enable them to not only go to university, but onto some sort of tertiary training or even jobs with prospects. And they'd be employed because they'd been at our school because by then they could cook for an army of 60 people because that's what we had to do every day. They could run a childcare. A lot of them did go into early childhood education and a lot of them went into primary teaching and many of them got on the boards of trustees of their own school. So if you like, the public sought them out because they knew that these students had so much more than what they would have gone in the regular school when there had been disruption.

Tania Cotton: The skills these girls went on to have were so much richer and broader than most children would ever get. So let's come back to some examples of that. I mean we talked about how a lot of the girls, well, Helen, if you talk about Helen, why did she come to the school?

Susan Baragwanath: Helen came to have lunch. She had a baby when she was 16. I think her partner was 15 as well. We didn't see much of him in the early years, but she stayed at home and then she got a bit bored. But her art teacher at the college before she got pregnant had recognised that she was an artist and he came to see me and said, "Look, I think she's quite clever, but she hasn't been in school for a long time, but I know she can draw." So she came to the school, but she didn't want to do any English or mathematics, but I said she had to if she wanted to do art and she said, "No, no, I've only come for hot lunch." And she tried it on very soon after she came into school. Her mother and her sister had turned up one day and the sister had been one of the girls that I couldn't save when she was at the college and they wanted to take her shopping. Mum had been paid her welfare and anyway, they both seemed to have money and they wanted to take Helen. So Helen didn't come and see me to say, "I'm taking the afternoon off or making up some story about seeing a doctor." She went to see Lania and she said, "Lania, I have an appointment." And Lania turned around and looked at her and said, "Don't lie, go back to your seat." So Helen had a choice at that point of staying or going. She chose to stay and she did very, very well in mathematics and English and the next year she wanted to do art and I said she could, but she had to do science and by that time I had a science teacher and somewhere along the line going out on field trips because we only had one cold water tap in the whole of the pub, she fell in love with science and she's now a senior lecturer at university. She's got a PhD. She's discovered anti-cancer compounds, I suppose. I don't know what they're called really and New Zealand sponges and Tongan sponges. She's currently in the Cook Islands on a research project and this year she's part of a Horizon Science Award, which is huge, millions and millions of dollars working with Imperial College London, ETH Zurich, Trondheim and Norway, some German university on marine biology, chemistry and the hope and AstraZeneca would be the drug company involved and the hope that they can develop this anti-cancer, whatever it is, inside a New Zealand sponge. So she was a genius.

Tania Cotton: So you never know what you can achieve until you try. And that seems like to be an overriding message is when people have an opportunity to have a go and to be exposed to education, it can be one of the best investments that we can ever make is to give that opportunity. And so, what happened to Lania? What has been her evolution?

Susan Baragwanath: Well, Lania is now head teacher of the attached childcare. We realised early on that she was never going to leave and she knew that she was never going to leave and so she said, "I want to be a teacher of early childhood." So she's now head teacher at the school and of course there are 25 schools around the country like my school. So I suppose they've got a private professional association. I really don't follow it perhaps as closely as I could, but these two are not the only ones. There was one girl who read about us in a magazine we must have had some publicity and she lived in Wanganui, which is quite a long way from Wellington and she decided that she was going to hitchhike and she hitchhiked to our school with her child and I don't know where she lived. She really was an artist and so she's now a professor and she did a master of fine arts and she's won all sorts of scholarships and prizes. And so it's not just one or two, it's, I don't know, 40 or 50 or 60 or 100. I really don't know, but the schools are still going and unfortunately teenage pregnancy hasn't gone down that much. It's gone down from what it was, but we couldn't cater for all of them, but it's still around and those schools are still needed from the north to the south.

Tania Cotton: I'd love to mention music because we talked about the power of creativity

Susan Baragwanath: Yes. In New Zealand there were seven essential skills of learning at that time and I had undertaken to have taught them all, which was pretty well impossible really with physical education and music. A student saw I used to take in the daily newspaper and she saw a little article saying that if you played Mozart, I think it was to the child in the stomach actually, you'd be more clever or something like that. And so she said, "Oh, I've found this. " So, I took that as a real opportunity and we'd have violin concertos and all sorts of things and that they accepted - and I had known that really from one of my sons when he was at the international school on the French speaking side. I don't think they did it in the English section, but one of the French teachers did do that and they would listen to classical music for an hour in the morning. So it wasn't rocket science, it just happened. But then as time went on, unbelievably a woman turned up at the pop and she had been starring in the Lord of the Rings film as, what do you call them idea, one with lots of hair, Frodo anyway, it doesn't matter, but she said, "I'm a music teacher and I'd like to help." And so I knew that Polynesians have the most beautiful voices and harmonising and so she moved in.

Tania Cotton: And there are many subjects, but one, of course, close to my heart, physical education and movement I laughed a lot when I heard that to begin with. It was, "We're doing PE, we're going to the post office."

Susan Baragwanath: Yeah,

Tania Cotton: Eventually it seemed like netball, that playing a game was important.

Susan Baragwanath: The students, they knew that I had to do something or they had to do something with physical education because it was one of the essential skills and they knew that I would get upset about it and if the auditors came, I mean that was our biggest worry really, that an auditor would come and close us down. There were so many reasons why they could. We were threatened a few times and it was such an easy one. I said, "Look, just run around the park or do something." And they'd just laugh, but they would go to the letterbox because at that point the curriculum was being delivered through correspondence and so they'd take quite heavy mail and they used that. And then one day they came and said, "Can we have a meeting instead of the lesson after lunch or something?" And I knew that anytime they called a meeting, it would be for an important reason. And on that particular day, an invitation had come from the city council asking them to join into a netball tournament in an afternoon and of course we had childcare in the afternoon so they were able to be free to go and eventually they loved it so much they fielded three teams in the local competitions. Of course they were quite big girls, some of them, very strong and they love beating the other teams and so they became very, very important if you like, in the area for their ability in netball and because they were then they would do exercises and jumping and whatever is required. I wouldn't have a clue, but you know what?

Tania Cotton: Yeah. You mentioned in your book that they called themselves Tikaha

Susan Baragwanath: Tikaha – 'The Mighty'.

Tania Cotton: Oh, the Mighty, that's a wonderful name. That is a wonderful name. So leadership, you've been very instrumental in the Women's Leadership Conference in getting us all thinking about the importance of perhaps stepping forward and how do we create enabling environments for good things to happen that should be happening and not putting up with things that just suppress what people's real abilities are. What for you is important about leadership, having yourself said that you were a reluctant leader

Susan Baragwanath: Yeah, I am. I still am I still feel queasy at the thought of speaking in public and I'd much rather stand beside behind someone else and let them do all the talking and take the flack and that sort of thing. Women's leadership, actually it was my son Jonathan, he was musing because he had trained as a lawyer and I had supported him all these years in doing his law studies. He had a change of career when he was about 40 into the leadership realm and I said, 'Maybe you should look at women's leadership.' And of course the next minute he's saying, "Well, who do you know could come and give the keynote speech?" And fortunately in my many travels and the fellowships that I'd had, I'd met a number of very, very impressive women and when I rang them up and said, "Listen, we're getting this together." They came very gladly and told people what they actually did. I mean, it's a greasy pole away up there to be the top of a tree in leadership and many people aspire for it, but they need to have confidence and also mentorship or someone to say, "You're really doing well." It comes back to this praise, doesn't it?

Tania Cotton: Yes. And the motto of your school was, "Of course you can do it. "

Susan Baragwanath: Yes.

Tania Cotton: And at this year's women's leadership conference, you had an old friend who was Gloria who was talking with you and she was one of the people who said to you, "Of course you can do it. "

Susan Baragwanath: Yes.

Tania Cotton: And really for me then leadership is also and what you've given those teenage girls is that belief that they can. And it's ironic that we're actually sitting in the village of Champéry in Switzerland where I made the MovementWise film 'The Art of Health and Human Performance' with Stefan Lambiel at the ice rink in Chapéry. I always remember the words he said in his interview and then you see it in the film that everybody can see on the MovementWise.org website, he said, 'Everybody needs someone who believes in them'. And for those girls at the school, but I think a lot of women in general, a lot of privileged people, but privilege doesn't mean money, privilege means that someone believed in you and gave you the confidence to actually have a go. And so for me at this conference, having all these different people doing things and showing people what is possible and that's what you've done, showing people what's possible when you don't just stay in your little fear bubble and comfort zone, but when you push the envelope and in spite of that fear, you have a go and you try things perhaps that you haven't done before.

Susan Baragwanath: That's right and Gloria is the Baroness Hooper and she's been in the House of Lords for perhaps 30 years, maybe longer, but she was also, I had a rotary fellowship when I was 21, went to the United States, she had one, but she went to Ecuador and we've known each other since my 20s. She's a bit older than me, but we've been together and good friends all of our adult lives and when I got the offer of a job in Geneva, I remember talking to her in London and saying to her, "Oh, you know, it's a different language." Of course I was from New Zealand, I didn't know very much and I'll have to find housing and this and that and the next thing. And she just came out with it. She said, "Of course you can do it. " And then went on to another subject and I thought she's not even going to discuss it with me. She's just thinking that this is something that I'm able to do. And of course, when you've got someone that you admire, because she already had a really interesting job at that time on her way up the greasy pole, you think, "Gosh, if she thinks that I can do it, then of course I can. " So that has been the motto of the school.

Tania Cotton: I think leadership begins there, but even more it's stepping back and it's leadership begins with actually seeing and believing in the potential of others and I think that's something that you have and I think Gloria has as well, you mentioned her and someone else who believed in you is your husband David. It sounds like he really stood by you and took time out to support what you were doing because he believed in what you were doing.

Susan Baragwanath: Yes. Well, he believes in the law and the law is for all and it comes back to the fact that every young New Zealander has the right to a basic formal education until they're 19. And of course, the UN has all sorts of education for all and different goals and things like that, but New Zealand had no excuse. I can understand in certain parts of the world and poverty and climate change and things like that. New Zealand doesn't have that excuse of not giving education for all. So I think it was part of that and David, you're quite right, he would write all these letters with all the supporting evidence and so on and it was compelling. Of course it's compelling. Feed the children, eventually they've done that. It took a very, very long time and everybody has to have the right and to be able to achieve a basic formal education. So it's not rocket science, and this has been laid down for generations. It's nothing new. What happens is that people don't follow it.

Tania Cotton: I think that also opens up the question of how we punish people who go to prison for often having fallen into a context that was against them right from the start. And when I read your book, I can see that there's such an understanding of that and your husband dealing with the law. Basically, if your basic human rights aren't being upheld, how can you expect to fight against a prejudice to prison pipeline? And when I look at like Caron McCaffrey at Irish prisons and the warden before her who have fought for replacing a punitive system into a system that provides actually practical education and skills that people can really pick themselves up and gain ownership and responsibility of their lives. I feel this is what your book really is all about. It's not just about one school, one story, it's about the story of our society. It's also about the story of mental health. It's a story about how when there's no me but there's only we, there's no them and us, how when we all support each other and that we give each other the opportunity to unlock human potential, that then this is the world that we all should be living in.

Susan Baragwanath: Yes. I mean, it's the ideal world really, isn't it? But we have to face the realities as well. I mean, I didn't have a vision. I didn't know that eventually there'd be 25 schools and we'd get purpose built childcares and lots of teachers and so on. I didn't know that when I was starting out. I was just upset that the rules weren't being followed and I think that there is a place if people see that particularly in early childhood and children's education, we do have a responsibility to our children to make sure that they have the best that can possibly be found. It doesn't have to be Rolls-Royce or anything like that, but it's worrying that actually I don't think the at-risk rate in New Zealand has gone down. I think it's actually gone up. Nobody has counted in my knowledge more recently, but sometimes we don't learn anything from the past and we should.

Tania Cotton: And you say you didn't have a vision. Yes. And it's funny how sometimes life unfolds and yet from day to day we feel a compelling desire to do something, especially for those who are put in a position where it's very hard for them to do something for themselves. And for me, as I think when I first read your book and I felt quite emotional reading it, I felt the book should be called 'A Path with a Heart' because yes, you went from day to day, but your leadership came from the heart and all those you attracted were people of the same heart and that was the connection and you created that belonging and you listened to others and helped them realise that they were as valuable as anyone else. So yes, it just shows how a small, compelling purpose that begins with an intention to want others to have the best opportunities can lead to great things. So perhaps this is the ambition for us all to have and this is really that where small things from each of us, small intentions from each of us can really create enormous change. It has the potential to create enormous change and your book and your life is an absolute testament to that and I think that's where it's really inspiring for all of us and especially for us women who can easily shrink into the shadows have got to resist that urge to run away and naturally say, "We're all the same. We all need help and support at times." And in a way, I'd like to bring up Michael Ungar, who's one of the world's leading experts on resilience, particularly resilience in children, youth, families, and communities. And his work is highly focused on the area that resilience is not simply an individual trait but is deeply shaped by context, context, relationships, access to resources and environment and that aligns very strongly really with your journey. one of Michael Ungar's most influential ideas is that resilience depends less on toughness and more on whether people have access to supportive environments and opportunities that allow their potential to emerge. Do you have a favourite film or a favourite quote?

Susan Baragwanath: Do I have a quote? Well, I remember in my years at school seeing a quote from Gerta and it said, "There's nothing more frightening than ignorance and action." And that stayed with me and I've thought of that a few times. "My goodness, am I doing this through ignorance or am I doing this through logic and sound reasoning and so on. So it's quite a brutal comment, but yes, it always gave me a barometer if you like, of not going too far, making sure that all the teas were crossed and that the processes were followed and I didn't do anything that was going to jeopardies the school or I didn't say anything that was going to ... Yes, you have to be prepared for everything.

Tania Cotton: And looking back now at this whole story, does it surprise you at what was possible from That first day when you heard the sobbing in the girls' toilets?

Susan Baragwanath: Absolutely. I could never have dreamed that the students would end up being the strongest party. I thought it was going to be me. I mean, I can direct traffic, but I think I said on one of the television programmes, I'm just the conductor of the orchestra.

Tania Cotton: You gave them the belief in themselves and they wanted to thrive. You gave them the means to do it and they ran with it. Susan, I can't thank you enough. It's just been- Oh,

Susan Baragwanath: It's a pleasure.

Tania Cotton: It's such a pleasure to spend time with you and to hear your inspirational life and on it goes. Thank you very much.

Susan Baragwanath: Thank you. The book's called The Red X.

Tania Cotton: Oh yes. We should mention that the book is called the Red X and the school is called Hey Huarahi Tamaraki.

Susan Baragwanath: It means 'A Chance for Children'. I had no idea what to call the school and I spoke to the Maori teacher. She said, "What are you trying to do in there?" And I said, "Oh, I'm trying to give a chance to children." And she translated it.

Tania Cotton: Beautiful. Thank you very much, Susan.

Susan Baragwanath: You're welcome.