Christine Blower

Christine Blower (born 20 April 1951) was the eleventh General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, a trade union representing qualified teachers across England and Wales.

She was born in Surrey, part of the home counties.

Her father was a miner in his younger days in the north east of England, and then a GPO engineer, as well as a Labour supporter.

She grew up in Kingston upon Thames and attended Tolworth Girls School, a bi-lateral school where she was educated in the grammar stream. Having contemplated a career in law or probation work, she instead trained as a teacher.

In 1973, she took her first teaching post, at Holland Park School, a comprehensive in Kensington and Chelsea which was then part of the Inner London Education Authority, where she taught French. At the time, the school had changed from streamed teaching to mixed-ability teaching, a style of teaching she prefers as it does not "create the sheep and goats situation that comprehensives were set up to avoid". Her daughter Sophie later attended the school.

In 1980, she became Head of Modern Languages at St Edmund's Secondary School in Fulham, then Head of Department at Quintin Kynaston School in Westminster in 1983.

With the threatened break up of the ILEA, Blower moved back to Hammersmith and Fulham in 1990 and concentrated on working with young teenagers at risk of care or custody at Farm Lane Adolescent Resource Centre. After its closure, she was redeployed as a member of the local authority's Behaviour Support Team. As she explained in 1997, "The brief of the team is to try and deal with the behaviour in order to calm the children down, get them focussed in on tasks so they can stay in the mainstream".

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