As Hatcham College marks 150 years and Haberdashers’ Academies Trust South
celebrates its 20th anniversary, Dr Elizabeth
Sidwell CBE — the woman who founded the federation — reflects on what it took.
When Elizabeth Sidwell arrived at Hatcham in the early 1990s, there was a sit-in protest outside the gates. Hatcham had been designated a City Technology College – one of only thirteen in the country – placing it outside local authority control and making it an immediate target for suspicion. The local authority was hostile, the Parents’ Association ‘just nasty all the time,’ and she later heard that some governors had wondered aloud how a single parent with two young children would manage. She kept smiling. By the end of the first year, one of the lead critics admitted: ‘We realised in the end that it wasn’t as bad as we thought.’ In fact it was very good.
That refusal to be deterred runs through everything Liz built over the following two decades. Hatcham, now 150 years old, was the foundation. But with applications running at twelve or thirteen to one, she knew the school was turning away hundreds of children it could have helped. What can we do?’ she kept asking. ‘How can we spread it?’
The answer came with the academy programme. The Company agreed to take on Malory School in Lewisham — described by the local authority as the worst school in the area. On a site visit, a girl who had heard of the Haberdashers through Hatcham asked who they were, then said: ‘Oh no, miss, you don’t want us. We are rubbish.’ Liz took this as a challenge. Liz remembers her Haberdasher Company supporters fondly and with gratitude. There was a strong governing board – Christopher Bostock fought the original legal battle with the local authority without which, she says, ‘we wouldn’t be anywhere.’ Richard Glover, Mark Powell and Deborah Knight provided quiet and supportive authority. The Company put its name visibly on each school it took on – which, she points out, not every livery company does. ‘That’s the skill of the Haberdashers. They stand up and say: this is going to be a Haberdasher school.’
She traces the moral impulse back to Robert Aske’s bequest — to help the sons of poor men. ‘I think that’s what made the Habs change and do it.’ She is proud too of what Hatcham has become across its 150 years, and of current Head Katie Scott and the great work that she is doing. The school today is unrecognisable from the one she inherited — confident, high achieving, and still expanding the opportunities she fought to bring in. Across the wider HATS network of schools, she sees the same ambition carried forward at scale: a trust now twenty years old, serving thousands of children across South London, built on the same conviction that no child should ever be told they are ‘rubbish.’
Asked what she would tell her seventeen-year-old self, her answer was ‘Be ambitious. Decide what you want to achieve and don’t let upsets along the way deter you. You’ve had the best start, so build on it. That’s what Haberdashers do. Always stand tall.’
