I don’t talk about what students deserve or earn, simply about what helps me teach and others learn. You may not agree with her political views, but she’s certainly seen enough to earn the right to those views. After graduating from Oxford she began her career in Manchester in the Sixties on the Daily Express , where she was regarded with suspicion and even hostility for being both educated and female.

My induction mentor’s support and acknowledgement of my unimaginably disruptive students finally forced administrators to take action. In the recent Reuters/Press Gazette launch of the Newspaper Hall of Fame she was listed as one of the forty most influential journalists in the last forty years. Shot at by Bosnian snipers, pursued by Robert Magabe’s secret police and been at Nelson Mandella’s release are some of the many tales she tells. Her mother, a great beauty, was indifferent to her eldest daughter and she was sent to the first of a series of boarding-schools aged just four, eventually winning a scholarship to Oxford.So new teachers should not try to kill all their snakes, particularly given the likelihood that they’ll have the toughest students. In the Sixties, she went on the trail of some fearsome Mexican drug traffickers while wearing 'white gloves, a white-and-yellow Horrocks frock (in those distant days, the epitome of the bourgeois Celia Johnson style), and carrying a white handbag'.

Then, after a stint covering show business she was appointed Foreign Correspondent of the Daily Mail , an association that endures today, almost 40 years later, and one which finally allowed her real talent to shine through. Until then, whilst I was aware of her, I'd never read any of her work or taken much notice when she was on television, and had dismissed her as yet another talking head journalist luvvie. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). But nowhere is it written that teacher-centered classrooms must be ruthlessly controlled environments of churchlike stillness.She ended up in a "Talibanic" convent school, a "ghastly, cold, damp mausoleum in the Peak District". Ann Leslie has been one of our top journalists for over three decades and has come across a myriad of people in her time. Even somebody like me, who vociferously opposes the honours system, can look at Ann Leslie and say: now, that's a Dame.