After her English degree at Goldsmiths’ College, Margaret Peacock decided to teach and stayed on at Goldsmiths’ to take a PGCE course. Her first teaching job was at a small London C of E comprehensive in Lambeth, after which she was appointed as Head of English at Kidbrooke, a very large girls’ comprehensive in Greenwich. After many happy years there, in 1988 she became Deputy Head at Chestnut Grove School in Wandsworth, taking up the headship two years later. Apart from a year’s transfer to support a local struggling school, having become an NLE (National Leader in Education), she stayed at Chestnut Grove for 25 years, taking it from a very challenging, underperforming school to a highly successful, popular school which achieved an Ofsted ‘Outstanding’ in 2008. She is very proud of the fact that many of Chestnut Grove’s senior staff are now very successful head teachers in their own right.

Since retirement, she works as a consultant to secondary and primary schools, is a governor of two schools (including one highly selective maths school) and is finding a new career in editing!