Lord Hague praises his Wath school days
You'd have to be a team player to reach the top in the varying worlds of sport, politics or education...or so you might think.
And in today's digital work, a background knowledge of technology wouldn't harm.
Yet Rotherham's William Hague has spoken about how neither of those things pertained to him back in the 1970s, when he was a Wath-upon-Dearne Comprehensive pupil.
Now aged 64, the former Foreign Secretary, Leader of the Conservative Party and current Chancellor of the University of Oxford, has spoken of the different times he grew up in.
He chose to touch on his South Yorkshire roots in a chat with an unusual publisher, The National, a state-owned English-language daily newspaper published in Abu Dhabi.
The platform said he had been born in a "manufacturing town in Yorkshire" and attended a local state school before eventually taking a place at Magdalen College, Oxford.
Asked to assess his Wath school days, which started in 1972, he replied: "Nobody had dreamt of any computers or anything like that” but he said sports was an area that could have been improved.
"I was one of those people who was no good at team sport, the rugby and the football, but later took up a great interest in martial arts and learnt to do judo.
"Most people will be good at one sport or another if they get the opportunity to do it,” he said.
In previous statements to Tes magazine, Mr Hague, who grew up in Wentworth, talked warmly of the value of his educational upbringing, saying the Tories were the first party to have had a leader who had attended a comprehensive school.
When he was 11, he had won a scholarship to top-performing Ripon Grammar, but detested the place.
"I said I was going to run away if I can’t go to another school. A month later it was all forgotten. I was at the local school and never looked back.”
One of his pals at Wath was Nigel Parry, now a highly successful celebrity photographer in New York.
“It was a great school and we all knew that," Hague told Tes.
"It didn’t have what you would regard as a classically good catchment area.
"Sometimes people think that whether a state school is good is wholly dependent on the socio-economic mix of the population around it.
"My school shows that’s not the case.
"Actually, if you have good leadership and set high expectations of pupils, you can achieve very good results in all kinds of areas.”
He added his Wath background, "Certainly (has) given me the confidence of knowing that you can just pull yourself up by your own boot straps."
Lord Hague of Richmond, as he is now called, continues to attract new positions in life.
Two months after being appointed Oxford Chancellor he has this week accepted a role as honorary patron of the Gems School of Research and Innovation, which opens in Dubai in August.
His role will be to advise on the school’s vision and technology, innovation, and artificial intelligence.