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Anne Walker

We are sad to announce that Anne Walker, who has been the ACERT Treasurer and Membership Secretary since 2012, died peacefully in a Torquay Hospice on Thursday last 29th October.

Anne spent most of her teaching career in Traveller Education. She qualified as a teacher after completing a part time degree at Manchester Polytechnic as a mature student. She worked in the Manchester Traveller Education Service taking over as head of service when Dennis Binns retired. After the service was restructured she took the lead of the Devon Service until she retired.

Her close friend of 40 years Debbie has written:

We were both stroppy feminists who loved literature and ideas, and were always able to talk about everything under the sun. I will treasure the memory of those long, rambling, discursive chats about everything from the profound to the personal to the trivial.

She was an early adopter of technology and created traved an early email chat forum for teachers of Travellers. She loved photography and combined it with her IT skills to make personalised books for Traveller children to take with them when they moved. She was a committed socialist and one of her last Facebook posts in August called out the poor attendance record Nigel Farage in Parliament as he criticised the work-shy.

Anne was an active member of NATT (the National Association of Traveller Teachers) and ACERT, as well as contributing to conferences organised by the Department for Education and the National Literacy Strategies. With Brian Foster she wrote Mainstreaming Traveller Education in 2009, many of the messages of which are still relevant today.

In 2012 and 2014 ACERT collaborated with the Council of Europe to deliver the ROMED mediation course in Manchester. These two residential courses brought together Gypsy Roma and Traveller activists from across the UK and laid the foundations of collaborative working relationships which endure to the present. Anne, with Margaret Wood led on this project and her coaching skills proved invaluable supporting participants completing their assignments.

Margaret recalls:

I have enjoyed her friendship over around thirty years. When we used to meet at the Institute of Education I always enjoyed having a good chat and catch-up beforehand at the Friends House café. Not just Traveller education – topics such as cake making and decorating, sewing, the repair café, cycling, holidays, family, gardening…..

Anne had huge commitment, integrity, kindness, intelligence, thoughtfulness, care for other people.

Anne cared for her mother, who lived nearby, in Bovey Tracey until she passed away in 2024 in her nineties. It seems unfair that one who gave so much to others should not be able enjoy a longer twilight.

Please feel free to share your memories of Anne below.

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    Girls Advisory Network

    ACERT is collaborating with Agenda Alliance.

    Agenda Alliance are calling on those who work with Gypsy, Roma, Traveller, Showmen and Boater (GTRSB) girls – such as teachers and teaching assistants, youth workers, and community groups – to support with recruitment to our Girls Advisory Network (GAN) session.

    The GAN is an informal group of young women aged 14-18 who work with Agenda Alliance to develop what policy changes they ask of the Government and to campaign for a better world for women and girls with unmet needs. This session will be specifically tailored to GTRSB girls, for us to challenge the disproportionate rates of absenteeism and exclusions that they face.

    Agenda Alliance will remunerate everyone who takes part, and will work with girls before and after the session to make sure they have everything they need and feel supported. The session will likely be held online, in October, and will last a maximum of two hours. If you know of anyone who might be interested in taking part, please contact their Co-Production Officer, Teddy.

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    Science Travels

    Marie Bowers, co-chair of ACERT, is Technician in Charge of the Physiology Teaching Lab at the University of Glasgow and a member of the Physiology Society. In a blog post, as part of the 150 voices of Physiology Series, Marie talks about how her colleagues in the Society have supported her in developing projects like “Science Travels”.

    I now find myself identifying as a Romany woman, a teaching technician and a Doctoral candidate 

    For the majority of my working life, I have been the only Romany in the lab, or at the conference, or at the outreach event. However, that can and should change to include members from our diverse communities of Romany and Travellers in physiology research and teaching.

    The project aims to engage Gypsy, Traveller, Roma, Showman and Boater students in physiology and STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine) more widely and educate our undergraduates and institutions about the communities and the health, education and societal inequalities they face.

    Marie pays tribute to the members of the Physiological Society who have helped her develop the project and take it from a pub audience of Glasgow Skeptics, to Westminster, the Scottish Parliament and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. In her opinion, the Society is: “people willing to identify opportunities, to share information and to support the efforts of colleagues even when their ideas sound a little ‘out there'”.

    The Physiological Society provides the space and the motivation to attempt this work. The Society helped me find my voice; my hope now is that it helps others to find theirs.

    While expressing gratitude to her colleagues, Marie is realistic about the challenges that lie ahead.

    There is work to be done; decolonisation of research and teaching, co-creation of research with underrepresented groups, and true recognition of the diversity of the physiology workforce.

    Read the Post

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