My friend Katy Barrett, who has died of cancer aged 54, was an inspirational teacher at the Gateway school in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, and latterly at the High March school in Beaconsfield. She pursued everything she did in life with relentless vigour.
She would work late into the night to perfect her lesson plans, so that each child was catered for. In the cards her pupils made for her when she was unwell, one had written that she was looking forward to Mrs Barrett returning so that she could finish reading them Street Child; another that whenever she worked on a bar graph she remembered Mrs Barrett’s help.
In recent months Katy had recreated for her class the Louvre robbery, in the school gym, using ladders and jewellery, in order to teach them about scale. At the end of each school year she would wrap a personally chosen book for each child that she taught.
In 2012 Katy and her friend Jane established a cinema club – the Blue Door Cinema – in Great Missenden. They wanted to start an activity that families could walk to together, and wasn’t the pub. Katy and Jane made 100 blue cushions for the chairs. Every showing involved homemade snack-plates, sweet or savoury, with items handbaked by Katy. A BFI short film about the project can still be found online.
Born in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, Katy was the daughter of Jane, a secretary, and John Richards, an insurance broker. She grew up in Great Missenden, attending the local primary and grammar schools, then won a scholarship to Bryanston, a private school in Dorset.
Moving on to read English at St Anne’s College, Oxford, she was a bright star: astute, sociable, welcoming, hospitable and loved by all. She organised memorable themed parties, often involving the hiring of large items (pub game-machines, casino equipment). Each guest had to bring a specific bottle of spirits or liqueur so that elaborate cocktails could be created in vats.
After university Katy trained with the law firm Withers in London, specialising in family law and dealing with the divorces of high-net-worth individuals. Her intelligence, both emotional and intellectual, proved invaluable in persuasion and dealing with awkward behaviour. After leaving Withers in 2008 to raise her family, she later trained as a primary school teacher, joining the Gateway school in 2012.
In 1998 she met Brian Barrett, and they married three years later. She described their two children, Eva and John, as her “life’s work – what I’m most proud of”. She is survived by Brian, Eva, John, her mother and her brother, Mark.
