Born on a farm in a village in rural Bangladesh little would I have believed that I would end up at Cambridge. It was a struggle like no other. A decade earlier my father’s name had come up in a green card style lottery for entry to the UK. He was lucky as he was the only one of his 9 siblings to have succeeded at the time. I now live in a totally different paradigm to that of my first cousins – many still living that life. My father and forefathers were farmers. Neither my mother nor my father was educated beyond primary school age. They couldn’t afford it!
I arrived in the UK aged 3 ½ and I wasn’t enrolled into school until after the age of 5 as my parents weren’t aware of the system back in the 1970s. I couldn’t speak a word of English until pretty late by today’s standards, and, aged 9, I was told by my school teacher that I had a reading age that was less than my chronological one. I was labelled the class dunce, as my peers were all ‘free readers’. You would be shocked to hear that I filled out my own secondary school application form, as my parents didn’t have the wherewithal to do so and understood nothing about the system. I put down the school that my friends were going to. It was an awful school. In fact only recently did I discover an article on Google branding it as the worst school ever! Wow! What a badge of (dis)honour! Truancy rates were high, there was no discipline, no inspiration, no aspiration.
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Your donation goes a long way to helping bring to tackling inequality of opportunity in education by providing high quality tuition to children needing extra support whose families are unable to afford it.
Help Us
Your donation goes a long way to helping bring to tackling inequality of opportunity in education by providing high quality tuition to children needing extra support whose families are unable to afford it.
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