Mike Baker
Mike Baker
Mike Baker
I only met Mike Baker a few times, but, as a fledgling teacher moving up the ranks, I followed his TV reports of educational strife and innovation with huge interest.
He took arcane stories and gave them an immediacy, a narrative, a sense of clarity. I admired his ability - like the best teachers I know - to take the complicated and to make it simple.
We met at various conferences and, in his role as a trustee of the National Education Trust, he revealed to me his support for Ipswich Town - because I live and work in Suffolk. He was going to visit our school on one of his inevitable journeys along the A14.
Then in 2011 he got lung cancer. His regular blogs became compelling, disturbing, uplifting reads.
He was essentially writing an account of his own dying.
It was characteristically honest, analytical and inspiring, and his tough resilience saw him completing a long cycle ride that would have defeated most of us just a few weeks before his death.
Right to the end he was innovating with his diet and exercise regime, campaigning about how to make hospital wards more humane, and commenting on education policy.
That he has died, aged 55, seems unthinkable.
I can only reflect on how privileged I was to have known him slightly, to have talked to him occasionally, and, more often than I deserved, to have received his kind words of support and encouragement.
He exuded optimism and clarity where so often there is obfuscation and rancour.
Mike: we will miss you, but we won’t forget all that you taught us.
Geoff Barton
22 September 2012
3:10 pm
Saturday, 22 September 2012