Double celebration for leading London head
The Pope has honoured a leading executive headteacher and TA winner who has seen her vision of a £47m 'learning village' in London's East End become reality.
Catherine Myers, winner of the 2009 Royal Air Force Award for Headteacher of the Year in a Secondary School in London, is director and head of the Bishop Challoner Catholic Collegiate School in Tower Hamlets - recently named the tenth most improved school in England.
An official opening and a special mass was held last month where the Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, announced that Catherine had been made a Dame of the Pontifical Order of St Gregory the Great.
He presented her with a medal and citation from Pope Benedict XVI. She and her staff were praised for their 'visionary courage' in creating a campus that will serve hundreds of children with first class facilities.
Mrs Myers has been head for 18 years and from 2001 led Britain's first federated secondary school with separate boys' and girls' schools and a mixed sixth-form college on the Bishop Challoner site.
Redevelopment began in 2006 to create state-of-the-art buildings such as new science laboratories, a theatre and dance studio, with some facilities to be shared with the local community. Girls and boys are still taught separately up to the age of 16.
