Final Lessons: William Flint Cahan reflects on 47 years at Haileybury

After 47 years in the classroom, William Flint Cahan retired from Haileybury at the end of the last academic year. The outpouring of affection and good wishes he received highlights the profound impact he has had on pupils over his decades at the School. Before leaving campus, we sat down with William to ask him a few questions about his time here, from memorable moments to the lessons he hopes pupils will carry forward.

We wish William a very happy and well‑earned retirement and send him our heartfelt thanks for his decades of dedication to Haileybury. He will be very much missed by staff, pupils and alumni alike.

Looking back over your 47 years at Haileybury, how would you summarise your time here, and which moments or achievements with pupils or colleagues felt most rewarding?

It is so difficult not to be clichetic – teaching, even in Haileybury, is always to a greater or lesser extent challenging and in a way so it should be, for teachers and pupils alike. It is by no means always easy and sometimes it is genuinely hard to ‘package’ the material, to get the message you seek to convey across so that the kids ‘get it’. You need to be able to ‘sell’ the product: you need the kids to ‘buy’ into it. When it works, when you see that snap of understanding, that smile, that glint in the eye, it makes it so worthwhile. Whether that is with ‘better’ or ‘weaker’ pupils – for me the reward is the same (even if the goals are, of necessity, different). It used to be said that teaching Middles Z on a Friday afternoon well was the mark of a ‘good’ teacher – I see the point: to be able to engage their minds and imagination is crucial as is to get the pupils to want to do well; it is also vital that a teacher can engage, challenge, and stretch the brightest pupils too. I think a teacher should judge himself or herself all the time as the lesson goes along, be rigorous in self-judgment at the end, and be genuinely committed to making things better.

My colleagues are and have been some of the kindest, most charitable, caring and loving people I have ever met. I shall miss my friends on the current staff as much as I shall miss the pupils. Over the years, in good times and in very bad indeed, my colleagues have stood by me and my family in astonishing ways that I could never have imagined. Over the years, as you can imagine, we as a family have had many challenging issues and events to deal with: I am literally in tears thinking of all the support my colleagues have given us. 

How have you seen the school and its community evolve during your time, and how did that shape your role?

In 1979 when I started there was one female member of staff – there were a couple of dozen girls in the Sixth Form only. Today the pupil and staff bodies have more than doubled in size and are 50-50 male/female. That, in my view, has made the most profound change to the school and the most profound change for the better. The full inclusion (how could anybody ever have thought that was a silly idea??!!) of girls and women utterly changed the face of Haileybury at the time and forever and for the better! All the unchallenged presumptions of superiority, all that macho banter was faced with the actual reality of girls and women: many pupils, and indeed staff, had to adapt and change – thank goodness! 

My first ten years or so (teaching originally in FR 15, then FR 8, then FR16, then the ML Centre, as was, then FR 16 swansong, tutoring first in Allenby when it was a boys’ house, then Batten, then Melvill (boys) then Kipling for 26 years) seem like something out of the pages of an almost black&white, or certainly period drama – with boys (mostly!) in tweed jackets sending trunks home at the end of term, piled high in front of the then Porters’ Lodge, by rail to farms in the West Country and Yorkshire, to vicarages, to garrison/market/provincial towns, and of course to London and the Home Counties and a few abroad, but the whole thing was nothing like as cosmopolitan as it is now.

Today, at the start of term, slick black sedans purringly disgorge slick tanned be-jeaned and be-Tshirted incoming LVMH accessorised pupils from UK, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Far East and beyond. It’s absolutely brilliant and as it should be – I have hugely welcomed and enjoyed the way that Haileybury has embraced the international dimension.

I was born in Paris, the son of a Canadian of Irish/Scottish descent who worked for what was then the EEC and a Welsh mother – so Europe and embracing internationalism is in my blood. I hope I have always conveyed that spirit to my pupils. If you teach my subjects, how can you not?

Looking back, what advice would you give to your younger self starting out as a teacher at Haileybury, and what’s one lesson or value you hope your pupils carry forward from their time with you?

I finished at Oxford in 1977 (before that I had taught for a term at Tockington Manor prep school near Bristol) and then didn’t have a ‘proper’ job, apart from working for Harrods Book Department, until early 1978 when I was offered a temporary English teaching job at St Paul’s, which they extended into the following year. Teaching was not what I had planned. My mother wanted me to go into the Civil Service – a ‘career path’ in those long ago days – I wanted to be a barrister (having not read Law, I was put off by the extra year of the Conversion course, and, in any case, my wife says that I can’t argue my way out of a paper bag), but I had enjoyed teaching, so I applied to Haileybury. Do I regret that? What an ABSURD question!

Advice always, cheesy as ever, follow your heart. (woops – a bit of Sursum Corda there – hadn’t realised it.)

I initially thought I would be at Haileybury for 3-5 years. At the time I thought the teachers who had been there for 25, 30 years were unbelievably out of touch. I think I was too young to realise how dismissive and judgemental I was being – many of those old colleagues with whom I inadequately related had been through WW2 and subsequent wars, the effects of which I, a callow 24 years old, really did not at all understand or appreciate. I still feel guilty about being insensitive to them and what they had been through. My advice to my former younger self is something I hope that I have learned, which is to be slower to make judgements and to criticise, and to be quicker to step back, think and look at the bigger picture, which lessons I have tried to pass on to my pupils. Stop, Look and Listen – wasn’t that the advice for children on road safety? It fits well for all the many roads we have to learn how to cross.

The other advice I would give to pupils is what I said to them in final Lists last term: they are central to what makes a school a school, they are very lucky to be at Haileybury and they have been given tremendous opportunities by being Haileyburians, but with those opportunities come responsibilities: the responsibility to ensure that future generations can benefit as they have done, the responsibility to do their very best to uphold values that make everyone’s Haileybury experience a positive and happy one, be they pupil, teacher, cleaner, groundsperson, dining-hall staff, IT support, carpenter, handyman, plumber, office worker, no matter what their role. The pupils need to look out for one another and treat everyone, most especially their fellow pupils, with tolerance, care and kindness, as they would want to be treated themselves.

Image taken by Bérenger (U6).