Jason Martin has been head of early years at Markham College in Lima, Peru, since 2023. Originally from Wales, he has more than 25 years’ experience as a teacher and leader, including spells in London, Spain and Brazil.

Markham College is a bilingual 3-18 Peruvian international school with a British heritage, offering a combination of IGCSEs and the International Baccalaureate, as well as the Peruvian national curriculum. It has around 2,000 pupils and a strong reputation for global citizenship.

Martin tells Tes about the challenges and rewards of a typical working week.

Teaching

We have about 450 children aged 3 to 6 - my daughter is 3 and has just started here, and my husband is a teacher and head of maths in the primary school.

A lot of my time is focused on parents, pupils, mentoring and coaching. I teach kindergarten group - the oldest children in early years - once a week. At the moment I’m teaching English because I love reading to children. We’re doing a project on Julia Donaldson - the most fun of her stories to read is The Smartest Giant in Town, which is also one of my daughter’s favourites.

We do a lot of collaboration with parents, and are proud of how we actively involve them in their child’s learning journey. Our next parent webinar will discuss the importance of reading at home and developing children’s native/home language.

We’re proud that our children become confident bilinguals. The school is nearly 80 years old and has a British tradition, but most of our children come from Peru, with Spanish as the first language.

We were excited to launch a celebration of reading in 2024, where we challenged parents to read 100 books with their child over the year. We actually weren’t going to run the “read 100 books” initiative this year because we thought it had demanded quite a lot of parents. Actually, though, the parents said they wanted to do more, to build on it in primary.

Morning meetings with the leadership team

Typically, we’ll catch up every morning at 7am to have a chat and coffee, reflect on the week, plan ahead, share thoughts and support each other.

I’m lucky to work with a very skilled and experienced leadership team comprising myself, three assistant heads (curriculum, teaching and learning and pastoral) and a deputy head of early years.

Meetings with staff and parent representatives

We’re very fortunate to have a strong representation of parent “delegadas”. Each class has a parent representative. Often they bring ideas, sometimes concerns, but the best is when they bring solutions. Working in partnership with parents is very important for developing trust.

We run a lot of parent workshops - we had 24 in 2024 - aimed at getting parents to come in, work with the children and learn together, to get a better understanding of how their child is learning at school.

We recently had a workshop for parents with a language consultant, who carried out an audit of our provision for supporting bilingual speakers in both English and Spanish. We offer an immersive English approach in early years, so I think parents’ minds were blown a little bit by the message that they should be focusing a lot more on their home language.

Coaching and collaboration sessions

Our head, Judy Cooper, has a strong belief in coaching. She has led and trained staff to develop a positive culture across the whole school, based on a mindset of support, professional growth and wellbeing.

As a school, we’ve gone through a process of training cohorts of teachers who - myself included - are now able to coach their colleagues. Every Wednesday since last year, for example, children have gone home at lunchtime and the afternoon is set aside for collaboration. That might involve teachers sharing best practice, or speakers or training that we buy in, but it’s also an opportunity for the coaches and coachees to meet.

Team-around-the-child meetings

This year, we’ve introduced a team-around-the-child meeting every Friday, involving the assistant head of pastoral care, the speech and language therapist, the director of learning support, myself, the deputy and sometimes other members of the educational team.

The idea is to go through each individual child that there is a focus on, or where there’s a safeguarding concern, then talk strategically about those children and agree a supportive action plan for parents or teachers. It’s been incredibly useful.

In early years, we place a strong emphasis on social and emotional development, which can also include supporting children who require additional learning support. Our assistant head of pastoral, Leslie Ramsey, is non-class based, allowing more time to work with the learning support team to set up waves of intervention, social-emotional support, work with outside specialists and meet with parents.

We’re very lucky to have a strong learning support team of psychologists, specialist teachers and occupational therapists - this collaboration is very important.

Learning walks

Learning walks are an opportunity to see learning in action - not just leaders, but teachers, teaching assistants, anyone who wants to observe practice in another learning space or area of the school. It’s really beneficial, even on a busy day, to have time to go and observe colleagues.

Personal time

I spend quality time with my husband and daughter - our life completely revolves around her. Lima is a fantastic city, very family orientated - the parks are wonderful - with lots of culture and amazing cuisine. Sometimes I’ll try to switch Netflix on and sit on the sofa a little bit; recently I’ve been watching The Handmaid’s Tale.

I’ve been with my husband for 25 years and we’re both very passionate educators, so when we finish school, the conversation often continues at home. I’ve recently completed an MA in early childhood and am now embarking on a National Professional Qualification for Headship and an MA in educational psychology.

What I would like to do more or less of

I’d like even more opportunities to be involved in developing pedagogies and working with colleagues. And sometimes admin weighs heavily on your shoulders - it would be great to take that away.

Jason Martin was talking to Henry Hepburn

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