spectator independent schools supplement september 2014

In association with

Guide to Independent SchoolsSeptember 2014

Cover_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 1 28/8/14 15:02:24

Rathbone Investment Management Limited is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authorityand regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority.

For more information, please contact Laura Crowley on 020 7399 0068

or email [email protected]

Rathbones is proud to be the offi cial partner to EnglishLacrosse and Lacrosse Scotland. Our investment willsupport the growth of the sport and ensure the best

possible experience for players and supporters.

Proud partners of English Lacrosse and

Lacrosse Scotland

@Rathbones1742 Rathbone Brothers Plc Rathbone Brothers Plc

1_00110984_Rathbones Ad_Lacrosse Spectator_260x210_v2.indd 1 20/08/2014 16:29ADVERT - Rathbones_06-Sep-2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260 2 22/8/14 16:18:58

IN ASSOCIATION WITH rATHbONeS | 6 SepTember 2014 | guIde TO INdepeNdeNT SCHOOlS 3

Testing timesExams are the bane of every student’s life, and in this competitive age the pressure to perform is higher than ever. Michael Gove may have left his post as Education Secretary, but he has left one thing in his wake: a new exam system. The GCSE reforms have already started, and the A-level revolution begins next year. To help us all along, Sophia Martelli offers a guide to the changes, and the differences they will make to students. Exams, however, are not the be-all and end-all (even if they feel like it at the time). South Korea might top many of the international league tables, but the fact that many parents there are looking for an alternative to the country’s intensive education system — Molly Guinness writes about one — just goes to show that too many exams may not be a good thing.

But this supplement, kindly sponsored by Rathbones, aims to celebrate all aspects of the British independent school system, not just academia. And it isn’t just when it comes to exams that schools have to adapt. As Johnnie Kerr points out, ‘going green’ is increasingly important, while Mark Milling, the bursar at Lancing, writes about how his role involves making the most of the commercial opportunities a school can provide.

It’s not all serious, though; Lara Prendergast considers the joys of history of art; Emily Rhodes investigates how school magazines can inspire a lifetime of creative writing, and Mark Palmer reflects on how a good teacher can transform a school career — and become a friend for life.

We hope that all of you, whatever your interest in education, enjoy this supplement. Please keep an eye out for the next edition, in March 2015.

The exam revolution Sophia martelli 5

Satellites of St Cake’s ross Clark 8

School magazines emily rhodes 10

Teaching IT rhiannon Williams 13

South Korea molly guinness 14

Great masters mark palmer 16

Latin Ysenda maxtone graham 18

History of art lara prendergast 20

Going green Johnnie Kerr 23

A bursar’s life mark milling 26

Glamorous decay Harry mount 28

Re-learning the tuba John Newton 31

Public schools and politics Tim Wigmore 32

Religious education Aidan bellenger 34

Editor Camilla SwiftDrawings John Jensen

Supplied free with the 6 September 2014 edition of The Spectator

www.spectator.co.uk

The Spectator (1828) Ltd, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP, Tel: 020 7961 0200, Fax: 020 7961 0250. For advertising queries, email: paul.bentley@ spectator.co.uk

Intro and contents_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 3 28/8/14 15:15:23

An independent school for girls aged 4-18Canons, Canons Drive, EdgwareMiddlesex HA8 7RJ 020 8952 0912

www.nlcs.org.uk @nlcs1850 nlcs1850

OPEN DAY 2014

Saturday 20th September

JUNIOR SCHOOL 4+ AND 7+ ENTRY

10.00am – 12.30pm

SENIOR SCHOOL 11+ AND SIXTH FORM ENTRY1.30pm – 4.30pmPlease arrive by 4.00pm, no appointment necessary

We will also be holding additional events for prospective parents and students in the autumn term. Please visit our website for further details.

Choice of IB Diploma or A levelsBursaries and Scholarships available

007_edu_sep_14.indd 1 22/8/14 15:11:27


A year from now, the new A-level curriculum will hit sixth-form classrooms; changes to GSCE have already been partly imple-mented. The exam reforms initiated by Michael Gove are hailed either as ‘much-

needed’ or ‘carnage’ depending on who you talk to.Although controversial, most teaching professionals

agree that a good sort out of exams is overdue, including Paul Redhead, a former head teacher who now works with the Council for Independent Education. Public exams have been ‘systematically devalued since the 1980s’, according to Dominic Cummings, Gove’s former special adviser. Comparing the UK’s GCSE and A-level results with their equivalents in other countries reveals a 2–3 per cent grade inflation level per year — which over ten years adds up to a lot. The format of A-levels shifted somewhere between 2005 and 2010 to reflect the modular format of GCSEs (including the ability to resit modules until the desired mark can be recorded) — although there is no record of any official decisions to make A-levels modular by the Ministry of Education, Ofqual or the exam boards.

That doesn’t mean it will be easy for everyone to agree on how the exams should change. The new curric-ulums were developed after the Department for Edu-cation looked at the highest-performing countries on exam league tables — from Finland to Shanghai — and applied the best of what they were doing to the English curriculum. Tougher measures have also been includ-ed. Thus in GCSEs, maths will have more emphasis on problem solving instead of formulae, and in arts subjects there will be more essays instead of multiple choice. But teachers lined up to criticise Gove over the changes in content to the history curriculum (‘half-baked’) and the manner of implementing reforms (‘undemocratic’), and there will undoubtedly be more controversy when the reforms meet pupils: the mop-up on that awaits Gove’s successor, Nicky Morgan. However, as Cummings remarks, ‘Even Tristram Hunt has agreed kids should be doing more maths and essays.’

What are the reform highlights? The major one is that exams will be linear, not modular. (‘We’re very pleased that modules have been discontinued — in GCSEs particularly,’ says Barnaby Lenon, chairman

Exams: the great leap forwardGCSEs have already begun to change, and the A-level revolution comes next year. Sophia Martelli considers who benefits from the new rules – and who doesn’t

An independent school for girls aged 4-18Canons, Canons Drive, EdgwareMiddlesex HA8 7RJ 020 8952 0912

www.nlcs.org.uk @nlcs1850 nlcs1850

OPEN DAY 2014

Saturday 20th September

JUNIOR SCHOOL 4+ AND 7+ ENTRY

10.00am – 12.30pm

SENIOR SCHOOL 11+ AND SIXTH FORM ENTRY1.30pm – 4.30pmPlease arrive by 4.00pm, no appointment necessary

We will also be holding additional events for prospective parents and students in the autumn term. Please visit our website for further details.

Choice of IB Diploma or A levelsBursaries and Scholarships available

007_edu_sep_14.indd 1 22/8/14 15:11:27

geTTy ImAgeS

Sophia Martelli and sidebar_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 5 28/8/14 15:16:21

6 guIde TO INdepeNdeNT SCHOOlS | 6 SepTember 2014 | IN ASSOCIATION WITH rATHbONeS

of the Independent Schools Council (ISC), and former headmaster of Harrow.) Instead, students will be exam-ined once a year, in June, which will lessen the burden of bureaucracy in schools, exam boards and government departments, and prevent resitting of modules — and the grade inflation that this practice led to.

The reduction of ‘non-exam-controlled work’ (in other words, coursework) means that core subjects including English, Maths and History will be graded purely on pupils’ output in exams. Many teachers view this as a good thing: coursework has become burden-some, with ‘dull, predictable tasks and coursework not always measuring what it’s supposed to be measur-ing,’ says Lenon. And let’s not forget, coursework also tends to measure the amount of support a student has at home.

Coursework will remain in some subjects (art, design and technology, drama, dance, PE); however, slightly more controversially, the practical exam mod-ule is being discontinued in the sciences. Even though data-logging and manipulative skills will be assessed by the teacher and a grade included separate to the exam results, the system is open to abuse — something that some teachers I spoke to are concerned about, as indeed is Cummings. However, a significant number of the questions in the A-level exam (15 per cent) will be about the practicals the student must have completed. Thus, argues Lenon, ‘This does not represent a down-grading of science practicals — it might even represent

Big changes are coming to GCSE, AS and A-level exams, aimed at making them more ‘fit for purpose’. Here are the key points:

• In practice most of the changes are designed to make exams tougher. From a student’s perspective, the most challenging reform is the abolition of modular examining. All exams will be done at the end of the course, and retaking bits of the exam to improve overall grades just won’t be possible.

• AS exams will continue but will not count towards A-level marks. Some schools will continue to use the exam as a useful target for students (in the ‘old days’ when A-level was ‘linear’ — that is, with exams at the end, rather than ‘modular’ with tests at regular intervals — students often took it pretty easy in lower sixth).

• It’s unlikely that universities will require the new AS, because that would penalise students whose schools decide not to offer it — but if a student has taken the new AS, will those results (for better or for worse) have to be shown? We don’t know yet.

• The new A and AS ‘specifications’ will be brought in over the next four years, key subjects first, with teaching starting in September 2015, and first new-style A-level exams in June 2017.

• The revisions keep the same A*–E pass marks, but exams will include a wider range of question types, and coursework will be examined only if it is essential to assessing the subject.

• A-levels not deemed to be ‘key subjects’ will undergo a ratification process over the next

year or so which will see most of them survive, albeit often in a ‘tougher’ form. Some such as Environmental Science and Human Biology will probably be dropped, though Film Studies and Media Studies are not on the endangered list. Full details at specc.ie/examchangedetails

• GCSE exams have already gone linear, and further changes lie ahead, with overhauled and often harder content and exams, and a new 9 (best) to 1 grading system. In particular, coursework will be cut back (GCSE Maths won’t involve any) and fewer subjects will offer ‘tiered’ exams — different exam papers aimed at higher or lower achievers. The timescale for changes is close to that for A-levels, and there’s a similar review of minority subjects. Paul Redhead Council for Independent education (CIFe)

An education revolution in seven bullet points

an enhancement, since with some exam boards practicals are limited.’

Another major change — an unpopular one with independ-ent schools — is that AS-levels will ‘decouple’ from A-levels, and will no longer count towards 50 per cent of a pupil’s final A-level mark. It’s not just that AS marks are a useful basis for university admissions (Cambridge, in particular, values AS-levels for this reason); these exams also provide students with a progress check halfway through a course, giving them some-thing to work for — and an inkling of which subjects, if any, to drop.

On the other hand, GCSE grades being more differentiated at the top end may help with university admis-sions. ‘There have been far too many students getting high marks at the end of their exams,’ says Lenon. ‘These are in exams which are not particularly stretching.’ Under the reforms, grades 1–9 replace A*–F, and it will be much harder to get a grade 9 than to get an A*, which will help the more selective universities identify the best candidates. Which raises the question, who are the best candidates? The unreformed exams favoured stu-dents who turned in plodding coursework on time — and with the ability to retake modules, the system didn’t exert much pressure on pupils. That will all change; the students likely to achieve the highest marks now are the ones who thrive under pressure and who can retain a large amount of information for a small amount of time — the ‘mavericks’, as Paul Redhead terms them. Much like the reformer himself.

Students will be examined once a year, which will lessen the burden of bureaucracy

Sophia Martelli and sidebar_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 6 28/8/14 15:16:21

IN ASSOCIATION WITH RATHBONES | 6 SEPTEMBER 2014 | GUIDE TO INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS 7

IBSTOCK PLACE SCHOOL

Wednesday 17 September

5.00-7.00pm

SENIOR SCHOOL OPEN EVENING

Saturday 20 September

9.00am-12noon

SENIOR SCHOOL OPEN MORNING

Thursday 25 September

6.00-8.00pm

SIXTH FORM OPEN EVENING

Wednesday 24 September Wednesday 12 November

9.30am

PREP SCHOOL OPEN MORNINGS

CLARENCE LANE, LONDON, SW15 5PY

Tel: 020 8392 5803 email: [email protected] www.ibstockplaceschool.co.ukFor further information please contact the Registrar, Miss Catherine Voysey

ADVERTS_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 7 27/8/14 17:04:44

8 guide to independent schools | 6 september 2014 | in AssociAtion With rAthbones

Want your sprog to be toughened up on the playing fields of Eton but can’t afford the fees? From September there is an intriguing alternative. You can send him instead to Holyport College,

a free school which is opening in the shell of an old spe-cial school six miles away. Though the chairman of gov-ernors, Simon Dudley, insists his new school is not ‘Eton Lite’, the website offers more than a hint that here is an opportunity to obtain an Eton-standard education for a third of the price, if your child boards, or nothing at all if he doesn’t.

‘Eton College is our sole educational sponsor,’ reads the blurb, ‘and therefore brings its educational and pas-toral expertise to Holyport College.’ Pupils are prom-ised the use of sports facilities, evening speaker meetings, and the chance to rub shoulders with Etonians.

Eton is not the first public school to dabble in educa-tional provision for the great unwashed. Wellington Col-lege has sponsored an eponymous academy since 2009. The London Academy of Excellence, opened two years

ago in Stratford, is sponsored by eight independent schools including Eton, Brighton College and Highgate. As well as borrowing some teachers from the sponsoring schools, the academy runs a buddy system in which its pupils are teamed up with private school pupils.

They even go on visits to see how the other half lives. ‘I got to visit Eton College boys, who wear tailcoats. That was a bit of an experience,’ one pupil at the academy enthused, as if he had just been on a safari.

Independent schools have scored a victory in their long battle with the Charities Commission. In 2006, the commission demanded that private schools with a charitable foundation must do more to demonstrate that they were providing a public benefit, press-ing in particular for more bursaries for children from poor families. In 2011, a tribunal at the High Court ruled that yes, schools with charitable status did need to show they were providing pub-lic benefit beyond educating their fee-paying pupils, but it did not necessarily have to be in the form of bursaries. The ruling thus opened the way for schools to justify their charitable status through off-site initiatives, such as sponsoring academies.

But is it just a ruse for public schools to show they are good guys, reaching out to the poor but without actually having to contaminate their ancient corridors with the proletariat?

Barnaby Lenon, former headmaster of Harrow and now chairman of the Independent Schools’ Council, insists

it is not. ‘The amount of bursaries at schools involved in academies has continued to grow,’ he says. It is hard not to wonder, however, whether sponsoring an acad-emy allows public schools to extend their influence over social groups to which they might balk at offering large numbers of bursaries. Holyport College, for example, has an admissions policy which gives first priority to chil-dren in care or previously looked-after children. Second in line are children with exceptional medical or social needs. Only after that does anyone else get a look-in, starting with children of the founders. It is hard to imag-ine St Cakes having an admissions policy where even the son of an aristocrat had to wait in a queue behind a line of battered children from the local housing estates.

From a strictly utilitarian point of view, sponsoring an academy is a superior way of proving charitable status to offering bursaries: it offers a large number of children some of the benefits of a private education instead of offering a small number of children all the benefits. It also comes at a surprisingly low cost to the school. I have to admit that when I heard that Eton was sponsoring an

A new way over the wallBy sponsoring academies, public schools can not only justify their charitable status but can extend their influence, says Ross Clark

Probably not coming to Holyport College: the Eton Wall Game

hulton Archive/getty imAges

Ross Clark_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 8 28/8/14 15:17:15

in AssociAtion With rAthbones | 6 september 2014 | guide to independent schools 9

academy my first thought was how were Eton’s parents going to take it — shelling out £34,434 a year for their Fauntleroys to go to a proper school and then finding out that £5,000 or £10,000 of that was going to help edu-cate a bunch of oiks down the road?

I needn’t have worried on their behalf. Simon Dud-ley let me in on the extent of Eton’s involvement with Holyport College. ‘The Old Etonian Association pro-vided £140,000 for an all-weather sports pitch,’ he says. ‘Eton College also provided accommodation for the newly appointed headmaster of Holyport and provided financial support for the bursar. All in all, Eton has pro-vided approximately £200,000 of financial help.’

Eton will also be providing some help on pastoral care and help with university admissions, which is harder to value, yet still it seems a remarkably small amount of sponsorship money for a school which carries its links with Eton so prominently and which is costing £15 mil-lion to set up. Take away the money given by the old boys, and the funds provided so far are the equivalent of less than two full Eton bursaries. All of which raises the question: why don’t all independent schools freeze their bursaries, or even chop them, and instead sponsor an academy, promoting their charitable brand without having to hand out free places?

There is good reason to suspect that Holyport Col-lege and the like will only be spawned by the larger public schools. Eton could sponsor ten highly successful academies and it is hard to imagine applications to its

own school drying up. But what about an independent school in a small provincial town that is already strug-gling to fill its places? The very last thing it needs is a decent state school on its doorstep, still less one that pro-motes the same ethos and bears its own brand name.

As Barnaby Lenon says, ‘No independent school would want to set up an academy in their area which was going to take their pupils.’ Indeed not. All the more reason for sponsoring an academy in another area.

This has the potential to get rather nasty. If you are an independent school in X-town, you might sponsor an academy in Y-town, but then what if the headmaster of the local private school in Y-town retaliates by sponsoring an acad-emy in X-town?

Then again, things might not get that far. More likely, I sus-pect, is that independent schools will develop an unspo-ken agreement not to open academies which poach each other’s pupils, and that their involvement in academies will be limited to inner cities and other private school deserts. I am sure that Holyport College, which itself is in a well-heeled area of Berkshire — only a couple of miles from the Fat Duck, if you want to spend your money there rather on your kids’ school fees — will offer an excellent education to children who might not otherwise get it. But don’t expect a free-at-the-point-of-delivery mini-Eton in every neighbourhood.

‘I got to visit Eton boys, who wear tailcoats,’ said one pupil, as though he’d been on a safari

GODALMING SURREY

GSA Girls’ Boarding and Day School 11-18 Registered Charity No. 312038

LOGIC WILL GET YOU FROM A TO B

Albert Einstein

01483 810551priorsfieldschool.com

Open Morning Saturday 4 October 2014

Priors_spec.indd 1 4/8/14 13:18:53

Ross Clark_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 9 28/8/14 15:17:15


‘The bath is still stained pink,’ said Anna, laughing as we reminisced about those hal-cyon days, now over a decade ago, when she started a school magazine.

Anna and I went to Westminster School for sixth form. We’d both come from St Paul’s Girls’ School, where magazines proliferated, and were sur-prised to discover that Westminster had none except for a rather grand annual put together by the development office, aimed more at Old Westminsters than current pupils. Anna was keen to set something up. It would be called Pink, she decided, after the school colour.

This brings us to the bath. A launch party was deemed of paramount importance, so we duly assembled in the basement of Anna’s parents’ house, where she had turned everything pink. Including pink tequila jelly… which led to pink vomit… which stained the bath pink. Let no more be said on the matter.

However successful the launch was, I was pleasant-ly surprised to discover that Pink continues to exist 13 years later. So I made an appointment at the school archive, where I was presented with three neat box-files containing every issue. Evidently this collection was deemed precious, as I was allowed to take notes only in pencil. Anna’s lead article in the first issue proclaimed: ‘expelled!’ (the graphic design forbade capital letters). In it she argued that expulsion was a tool to create scape-goats rather than to help troubled students. There fol-lowed an intriguing piece about the ‘Greaze’, a bizarre school tradition of fighting over a pancake. Then came an interview with the actress Harriet Walter, a selec-tion of student photo graphy, a round-up of recent news stories and some film and music reviews, including my own painful critique of a chemistry teacher’s solo guitar album. I should also mention the column entitled ‘Sex in the Sixth Form’, by a girl who these days is penning a book about sex and youth in China.

It would seem that even at the tender age of 17, the magazine appealed to something in many of its contrib-utors which would go on to influence our careers. Look-ing back at those who were involved with the first issue of Pink, I’m struck by quite how many of us went on to pursue a long love affair with writing. Anna is now a novelist and travel writer; Hattie worked for years at the Times and now writes a successful blog; Rory was an edi-tor and is now a literary agent; Julia works for English

PEN; another Emily has become a translator; and I am riddled with the writing bug, for sure.

I happily read on, tickled pink to uncover a Wham bar, which had been given out with issue four. Leafing through the years, I noticed a shift in the magazine’s focus. While elements of self-involved schooliness were present from the beginning, these had been balanced by more sophisticated articles, which engaged with sub-jects such as surveillance, anti-Americanism and posi-tive discrimination. Over time, these all but vanished; instead Pink became increasingly full of lingo and in-jokes, snipes at teachers and photos from parties. Maybe, as the success of Facebook would suggest, such self-in-volved self-expression is what people — perhaps teen-agers in particular — really enjoy. Maybe this is what gained Pink enough popularity to keep going for so many years.

The archivist informed me that the headmaster had begun to censor the magazine. Though surprised, I could certainly understand why he had wanted to try to exert some form of control. A few marked-up photocopies were included in the files; his comments included: ‘This insult sounds too rude and personal.’

Perhaps it was the censorship that snuffed Pink out in 2008. Or perhaps pupils preferred to turn to the online delights of Facebook for their selfies and gossip. In 2013, however, I saw with glee an energetic new publication proclaiming ‘Pink’s back!’ and urging readers to tweet @Westminsterpink. Sadly, when I looked up the Twit-ter account, the activity seemed to have lasted for only a few months, gaining a mere 48 followers. Two issues were published last year, but the second was tellingly slim. I left the archive unsure whether Pink will garner a sufficient following to continue.

Gaining enough contributions seems to be the toughest hurdle for a school magazine. At St Paul’s, this is what stalled the creative-writing magazine I founded, which lasted just one issue. Though a kind Eng-lish teacher pointed me in the direction of a few talented young writers, I struggled to gain submissions, so rather glumly decided once was enough. Anna coyly admitted that when she started Pink, she’d resorted to asking vari-ous students if she could write articles under their names so it didn’t look like she’d done quite so much of it.

Early editionsContributing to a homegrown school magazine can inspire a passion for writing that endures into adulthood, says Emily Rhodes

Over the years, the magazine filled with in-jokes, snipes at teachers, and party photos

Emily Rhodes on school magazines_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 10 28/8/14 15:18:48


I spoke to Georgia, who recently left St Mary’s Calne. Her magazine, The Fortnight, was only eight pages long but appeared with startling frequency — every other Monday. She said that she and the other two editors had needed to write almost all the copy to begin with, but submissions had flooded in before long. What spurred such a rush of contributions? Ucas forms, she said.

While some contributors may be motivated by no more than the cynical reality of looming university entrance, Georgia’s passion for the magazine was real. She told me how much she’d enjoyed working on it, especially when the pressure from schoolwork mounted. She found it to be a welcome means of keeping herself informed with current affairs instead of disappearing under piles of books for exams.

Evidently, her experience with the magazine helped foster a love of the written word, for she has gone on to

Cambridge to read English, and tells me she would like to work in publishing. I think of how many of us involved with Pink have since made our homes in the literary world, and wonder if there is something un expectedly powerful, perhaps even life-changing, about working on a school magazine.

An enthusiastic Haileybury English teacher, who recently helped students set up a creative-writing magazine, told me that he hoped some of those involved might go on to contribute to an undergraduate mag-azine and maybe even eventually start something up themselves. ‘I guess the majority of these start-ups are short-lived,’ he admitted, ‘but, perhaps more so than the big publishing houses, they are vital to the health of literature — they are its grass roots.’ Certainly, school magazines can inspire a passion for writing that, for some of us poor hacks, lasts a lifetime.

Emily Rhodes on school magazines_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 11 28/8/14 15:18:49

12 GUIDE TO INDEPENDENT SCHOOLS | 6 SEPTEMBER 2014 | IN ASSOCIATION WITH RATHBONES

OPEN MORNINGSATURDAY 4TH OCTOBER

10.00AM – 1.00PMTo attend, please call Nicola Jones on 01865 517103

or email [email protected] independent day and boarding school for girls aged 11-18

74 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6JR www.wychwoodschool.org

“A charming pint-sized powerhouse”Good Schools Guide 2014

inspiringindependent minds

A leading boarding and day school for girls aged 11-18, offering an outstanding all-round education.

Scholarships available at 11+ , 13+ & 16+

T: 01747 857111 or visit www.st-marys-shaftesbury.co.ukSat 18 October & Fri 14 November

Come to an Open Morning:Daily transport available



My first memory of a computer is of a hulk-ing Acorn PC that dominated a corner of my primary school classroom. I remem-ber crafting a story about ghosts on the beige keyboard before saving it to a flop-

py disk, which was filed away by the teacher for safe-keeping. That was in 1995, and washing machines now easily outpower that Acorn. Yet it’s not only the gadgets in our schools and colleges that have advanced as tablets, interactive whiteboards and internal mail systems make relics of blackboards and personal planners. From Sep-tember, Information and Communications Technology classes (ICT) will be replaced with Computing as part of an initiative to teach children how to create their own programs, instead of just learning to use other people’s.

Teaching pupils from the age of five to write simple algorithms and helping older pupils to learn program-ming languages is part of what Michael Gove, in Octo-ber 2012, claimed was what Britain needs in order to ‘produce the next Sir Tim Berners-Lee — creator of the internet’. The former secretary of state for education may have been left red-faced (Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, not the internet) but the dramatic amendments to the curriculum have been hailed by many as essential to turning around the country’s technological fortunes.

In a speech in 2011, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt criti-cised the British education system’s lack of focus on com-puter science, saying we were throwing away our ‘great computing heritage’. We may have invented photography, TV and computers, but Britons fail to dominate in those fields of technology now. What’s needed is to reignite children’s passion for science, maths and engineering.

I recently attended a Bermotech summer camp, where children and teenagers between nine and 15 were learning how to develop their own iPhone apps, and was struck by how quickly these bright young things picked up commands. Until the camp, their programming was largely self-taught. They’d watched YouTube tutorials and downloaded free pro-grams in an effort to learn the basics, and they were clearly thrilled to have some proper instruction at last.

Providing coding lessons in school has a real purpose. There’s little point denying that an in-depth knowledge of computing would serve young peo-ple well when they enter the job mar-ket. Britain will need 750,000 skilled digital workers by 2017, according to research, and failing to bridge the skills gap could cost us up to £2 bil-lion annually. Steve Beswick, direc-tor of education at Microsoft UK, estimates that between 80 and 90 per cent of jobs require some computing knowledge, and that is set to rise. ‘We need to get to the point where people coming out of education can fill those jobs,’ he says. ‘Across the IT industry,

it’s our responsibility to help to close that gap.’Countrywide, schools are already making changes

ahead of September’s new syllabus. Barrow Hills School in Surrey recently equipped pupils and teachers with Samsung tablets in place of exercise books, journals, text-books and calculators, and London’s Henwick Primary School already instructs its pupils how to create their own computer games, quizzes and short animations.

It’s not just about the pupils. Some teachers are under-standably nervous about teaching skills which they have not fully mastered. Yet this isn’t such a barrier as it may appear, according to Henwick’s ICT co-ordinator Claire Lotriet. ‘Most of us have never been taught computer sci-ence,’ she says. ‘If a teacher is worried the children are more confident in using technology, it’s worth remember-ing they may be more familiar, but they may not always know how to channel that into something useful.’

Ah yes. Parents may question whether fiddling around creating a computer game can be viewed as ‘useful’, but Gove wasn’t wrong when he said that the way ICT had been taught was ‘harmful, boring and irrelevant’. Encour-aging children to think logically by experimenting with new tools and processes must be better than boring them to tears with lessons in how to create a spreadsheet. A renewed focus on internet safety and online behaviour is another crucial element in equipping them to navigate lives that will be documented and mapped online.

Of course, showing a five-year-old how to make apps and websites step by step won’t necessarily turn them into the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. But given the extent to which technology has changed, it’s high time that the way we taught it caught up.

Pushing the right buttonsThe changes being introduced in teaching computer science are long overdue, says Rhiannon Williams

geTTy ImAgeS

Rhiannon Williams_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 13 28/8/14 15:19:23


South Korea’s education system puts us to shame. Last year the BBC tested a group of 15- and 16-year-olds with some questions from a GCSE maths paper; they all finished in half the time allowed, four scored 100 per

cent and the other two dropped one mark. It’s the kind of performance most British teachers and parents can only dream of, so at first it’s surprising that a London girls’ school has opened up a branch in South Korea. The North London Collegiate (NLCS) is one of Brit-ain’s top schools, but it still looked like they were going to have a lot of competition on their hands when they chose South Korea for their first international franchise. Three years ago they opened up a co-educational school on Jeju island off the south coast of Korea, and they’ve just had their first sixth-formers’ exam results.

It was the Korean government who invited NLCS to

set up in Jeju, because they were wor-ried about a brain drain. More and more children were being sent away; in 2007 more than 20,000 Korean children were at school abroad. The nation’s extraordinary proficiency in maths and science comes at a price: teenagers reg-ularly spend 13 or 14 hours a day stud-ying, dutifully going off every day to

after-school classes, known as hagwons. They’re all com-peting to get into three universities and it leaves a lot of teenagers stressed and sleep-deprived. The national exam fever has been linked to Korea’s high suicide rate among young people.

The drudgery and the pressure of Korean students’ life is a far cry from the sunny, end-of-term atmosphere I find when I visit the North London Collegiate in Stan-more in Middlesex. Lawns dotted with rose bushes and shaded by cedar trees stretch into tennis courts with a folly beyond. Three or four teenagers are sprawled on the grass, one of them wearing fairy wings. They’ve just had their end-of-term sketch show where some of them have been doing impressions of the deputy headmas-ter, Daniel Lewis, who I’m here to meet. As I wait in an elegant, airy hall, a 17-year-old bounds in and announces to her father: ‘She’s making me read Mill on the Floss or

Escape from the hothouseMolly Guinness visits the British school that’s giving Korean children a more rounded alternative to their country’s fearsome exam culture

Girls sitting South Korea’s famously competitive university entrance test. North London Collegiate offers IBs instead

getty imAges

Molly Guinness_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 14 28/8/14 15:19:52


Great Expectations!’ She’s pretending to complain but she’s evidently delighted with the commission. There’s a relaxed feeling here at the moment, but there’s ambition everywhere. ‘Go for Mill on the Floss,’ the girl’s father says. ‘This lady’s from The Spectator and you want to be a journalist; introduce yourself, send her your CV, maybe set up some work experience.’ On the walls are framed biographies and pictures of successful alumni, like Anna Wintour, Rachel Weisz and Stevie Smith.

It’s this kind of cachet that helps to persuade South Korean parents that they can afford to take their chil-dren out of the rat race. ‘South Korea is very strong in maths and science, but they’ve only ever had one Nobel laureate,’ says Daniel Lewis. ‘A lot of parents are looking for a different kind of education for their children.’

He remembers one mother coming to look round and she asked how her child would have time to go to the hagwon. When staff explained that he wouldn’t be going to a hagwon, she started crying with relief. In a recent application to become a prefect, one pupil reflect-ed on the differences between NLCS Jeju and his previ-ous school: ‘I still remember Mr Schofield’s bright smile greeting us at the front gate,’ he wrote. ‘In this school, understanding things is much more important than memorising. What is really important is whether you really enjoy learning.’

Of course, all this jolliness means the pupils wouldn’t stand a chance in the national exam, so instead they take the International Baccalaureate and then mostly apply

for British or American universities. There may still be a brain drain, says Lewis, but at least they’re staying long-er; some of the pupils he has interviewed are nine years old and already at boarding schools in Europe. At the Jeju school, pupils don’t lose touch with Korean culture; lessons are mostly in English, but there are Korean les-sons in language, literature, history and sociology.

There’s also as much extracurricular activity laid on as possible, which is a novelty for most students. ‘They’re all really up for it,’ says Lewis. ‘They don’t know what they can’t do, and they develop confidence by trying things.’ But in a culture where exam results are everything, par-ents sometimes find it hard to see why the school is taking their children on a sailing trip or giving them a part in a musical. ‘It’s a big leap of faith for parents to send their children to us,’ says Lewis. ‘They’re used to num-bers all the time and there’s a constant pressure for more data.’ In this year’s exams, the school did well, scoring an average 36 points, which is equivalent to Singapore, the highest performing jurisdiction for the IB. Lewis is confident that the results will persuade more parents to send their children to Jeju, but more than anything, he’s proud of the atmosphere they have created there. ‘There’s already a groundswell of support and under-standing about what we’re trying to do,’ he says. ‘They just see that the children are happy.’

Told her son wouldn’t need extra lessons after school, one mother wept with relief

Open Events 2014Sixth Form Open Evening Wednesday 1st OctoberOpen Morning Saturday 4th OctoberOpen Evening Thursday 9th OctoberSchool in Action Wednesday 5th November

To book and for times: 020 7348 [email protected] www.stjamesgirls.co.uk

St James provides for the intellectual,emotional and spiritual developmentof every child.

Earsby Street | London W14 8SHRegistered Charity No. 270156

ST JAMESSenior Girls’ School

Spectator ad 'I AM'.pdf 1 18/08/2014 16:51

Molly Guinness_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 15 28/8/14 15:19:52


Frankly, I wasn’t a great success at school — although I like to think it was more a case of peaking at prep school, where I was captain of football, a prefect and even managed to pass Common Entrance, thank you very much. And

then it all went downhill.No excuses (plenty actually), but one reason for fail-

ing to dazzle at Eton was because my classical tutor cast such a long, dark shadow over me that by the age of 16 all my energies went into disliking him as much as he clearly disliked me.

His name was Fred How and he was a bachelor so set in his creaking ways that even the swots and good-ie-goodies struggled to find anything pleasant to say about him.

We dreaded our weekly sessions in his pokey ground-floor flat in the cloisters not far from the Head Man’s plush quarters. It seemed that he went out of his way to say nasty things in his reports (‘Palmer displays jaun-ty incompetence’ was one of his kinder comments) but thankfully my father — who never had a bad word to say about anyone — did not take it too seriously because How had taught him 30 or so years earlier.

‘Not my favourite beak,’ my father admitted. In other words, he couldn’t stand the fellow.

After three long years, Fred How and I parted com-pany. I still have all my reports. This was his final salvo: ‘I cannot pretend to be sorry that this is my last half as his tutor … I hope that a change will be as good for him as for me.’

Great mastersIt only takes one excellent teacher to transform someone’s entire school career, says Mark Palmer

Mark Palmer_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 16 28/8/14 16:03:22


And it was. Night and day. A revelation, in fact. I approached a young man called Jeremy Nichols to be my tutor in the senior school and I remember how pleased I was that he agreed to take me on, given my abysmal academic record and, well, jaunty incompetence. I still am grateful — and would venture that it only takes one schoolmaster to make the whole education process worthwhile — and that if you can keep up with that per-son 40 or so years later then you’re mighty fortunate.

I say ‘young’, and I realise now that Jeremy really was young. He was only 27 when we met in 1970. More important, he was courting his future wife, Annie, at the time, which meant that on several occasions he would leave us a note saying he was in London and that we should listen to Dylan Thomas on his gramophone — for discussion a week later.

We duly did listen to the Welsh rabble-rouser and, appropriately, helped ourselves to Jeremy’s whisky and even got away with a few ciggies because Jeremy used to smoke a pipe (still does), so there was no chance of detection.

Another great bonus was that he took the First XI football (and was not a bad player himself) so that, while I wasn’t brilliant at discussing Chaucer, we could have a meeting of minds over whether to play a sweeper at the back or pack the midfield when playing away to Charterhouse.

He was funny, mischievous, articulate, loved words, a listener as well as a talker, good at tennis. And he treat-

ed us as reasonably responsible young men. No won-der, then, that he became a housemaster and later was appointed headmaster of Stowe.

As it happened, many years later, my daughter went to Stowe, but sadly she just missed Jeremy. More for-tuitous was discovering that my old school friend James Dallas was living in the same Wiltshire village where we had bought a tiny bolthole — and James had also had Jeremy as his tutor.

‘Let’s invite him up for the weekend,’ said James one evening. And that’s what we did.

Jeremy is 70 now and living in Cornwall. His wife Annie sadly died far too young from cancer, but he has since remarried — to a charming woman called Kath-erine Lambert, who is editor of the Good Gardens Guide. James asked a couple of other former pupils of Jeremy for dinner on that Saturday night and it was one of those evenings when the past and present merged effortlessly in a bond of trust and good humour. We even touched on Dylan Thomas.

Next day, Jeremy and I attended Matins in the village church, after which he and Katherine came for brunch and I was able to introduce them to my stepsons and their girlfriends.

On leaving, Jeremy gave me a hug. I don’t think Fred How would have done that.

I remember how pleased I was that he agreed to take me on, despite my abysmal academic record

Open Events 2014 Open Events 2014Leading Independent School for Girls aged 11-18 Leading Independent School for Girls aged 4 -18

Senior School9th October 5th, 14th November

Senior Open Evening24th September 5.30-7pm(no booking required)

Sixth Form Open Evening7th October 6pm

To reserve a place please contact the Registrar, Mrs Sandy Bailey

Junior School 29th September13th October

Senior School5th, 20th November

Senior Open Evening7th October 6-8pm(no booking required)

Sixth Form Open Evening2nd October 6pm

To reserve a place please contact the Registrar, Mrs Fiona Holland

Reg. Charity No 312745 Reg. Charity No 312745

Mark Palmer_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 17 28/8/14 16:03:23


Verb says to noun, ‘Would you like to conju-gate?’ Noun replies, ‘No, I decline.’ A nice witticism for Latin-lovers brought up on L.A. Wilding’s Latin Course for Schools; but do today’s prep-school Latin pupils have any

idea what a conjugation or a declension is? Some do and some don’t, is the answer, and it all

depends on which textbook your teacher uses and how much he or she believes in the importance of grammar over the importance of enjoying a story. The story of Latin teaching in this country over the last 130 years has been one of reaction and counter-reaction; and there are signs of a counter-counter-reaction on the way.

First, there was Kennedy’s Latin Primer (1888). Ben-jamin Hall Kennedy, clergyman and headmaster of Shrewsbury, was the man who decided that noun cases should be in ‘nom, voc, acc, gen, dat, abl’ order. His Latin Primer (still in print in a revised edition — revised in 1930) is almost all lists and tables. It’s a terrifying book for anyone who loathes rules; and it brought into being the non-sequitur poem which I remember finding scribbled in the margin of my dog-eared textbook: ‘Latin is a dead lan-guage, as dead as dead can be. First it killed the Romans,

and now it’s killing me.’ (The more I think about it, the more hopeless that poem is.) It also made clever school-boys very, very good at Latin.

Then came L.A. Wilding, Latin master at the Dragon School in Oxford, who wrote his Latin Course

for Schools in 1949. ‘In the beginning, God created “amo, amas, amat”’ is its basic message; ‘and on the second day He created “mensa, mensa, mensam”.’ The language is explained in flawlessly logical order. In his introduction, Wilding has a shot at explaining to reluctant schoolchil-dren why learning Latin is important. ‘The Romans both thought and expressed themselves with the utmost clear-ness. One of the chief objects of education is to learn how to express ourselves clearly, and there is no better way of reaching this goal than by studying Latin.’ No pretence at all that this was about learning How the Romans Lived.

In Wilding’s world you never use a Latin word with-out knowing exactly what case or tense it is in. Gradually Wilding builds you up from translating ‘The sailor walks,’ via ‘The sailors arrive on the island with roses’, to ‘The Romans fought well by land; they did not always show the same skill by sea.’ Among the thousands of boys’ efforts to translate sentences such as these from books of this ilk, two mistranslations from Latin are treasured: ‘Scipio ordered the women to display their booty in the forum’, and ‘Only the king may take the horse from the rear.’

Enough of these disconnected, grammar-obsessed sen-

tences, said the Cambridge Latin Course (1970). With hip-py-like daring, it landed pupils straight in the deep end with two sentences introducing its chief character: ‘Caecil-ius est in horto. Caecilius in horto sedet.’ What? An abla-tive in line one? And a second-conjugation verb? This is surely running before you can walk.

But who cares? said the Cambridge Latin Course, and many contemporary teachers agree. The point is that pupils should enjoy Latin from day one, and the way to make them do that is to tell them a story about a family in Pompeii: Caecilius, his wife Metella, the cook Grumio, the slave Clemens and the dog Cerberus. By Lesson 2 the family is tasting peacock in the dining room. The vocabu-lary just lists words like ‘tradit, capit, currit’, without fitting them into a conjugation system. The book is beautifully illustrated, and a huge commercial success — as is a simi-lar book for younger children, called Minimus, by Barbara Bell. Minimus is ‘the mouse that made Latin fun’. It has sold 145,000 copies and is about to be translated into Slov-enian and Portuguese. Barbara Bell is a huge fan of ‘fun’, history-based Latin learning. ‘I love the Cambridge Latin Course,’ she tells me. ‘I wouldn’t teach anything else at senior school. It’s a bit like the Suzuki method. You learn to play the violin and then, much later, you learn that the note you’re playing is called Middle C.’

And now we come to the latest counter-reaction. The way has been paved by the Independent Schools Exam-ination Board’s ‘Practice Exercises’ books, which hark back to the grammar-based system to prepare pupils for Common Entrance. Now a brilliant young Latin mas-ter at Highfield School in Liphook, Hampshire, Edward Clarke, has written Variatio: A Scholarship Latin Course, which is being piloted at Highfield prior to wider pub-lication. Clarke can’t bear the wishy-washy methods of the Cambridge Latin Course and feels that ‘Caecilius est in horto’ is a completely useless piece of information for anyone who needs to learn how Latin actually works. ‘It doesn’t give you the tools you require to translate any-thing.’ His book is illustration-free and he’s proud of it: ‘I can’t remember a textbook that was really made better by a picture of a pot.’ In four years, his book and his enter-taining but rigorous teaching method will take pupils all the way from ‘amo, amas, amat’ to the near-GCSE level required for a scholarship to a top public school.

If Latin is learned in this way, Clarke believes, pupils will reach a level at which they can really understand and relish the syntax of Virgil, and then the fun can really start. ‘Then we can start reading Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis,’ and I’m working on some Doctor Who translations – mainly because “Tardis” and “Metebelis 3” decline. But you’ve got to get there first.’

The vital element that seems to have been lost from Latin teaching, Clarke feels, is ‘prose composition’, or translating from English into Latin. For some reason, teachers seem to believe that this is ‘too difficult’ for pupils; whereas, in Clarke’s experience, if pupils start translating from English into Latin from day one, it is one of the most enjoyable aspects, ‘like doing a good sudoku’. Even at scholarship level, prose composition is optional. But ‘If you want your son to get a scholarship to Eton,’ Clarke says, ‘my advice is, do the prose composition. Very few take that option, and you can excel.’

Decline and rise againGrammar has been disappearing from Latin lessons in schools, says Ysenda Maxtone Graham – until now…

‘I can’t remember a textbook that was made better by a picture of a pot,’ says Clarke

Ysenda_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 18 28/8/14 15:20:26


A Co-educational Catholic Boarding & Day School for 3–18 year olds

Stonyhurst Clitheroe Lancashire BB7 9PZ 01254 827073 [email protected]

OPEN DAYS 2014 – 11th October (3–13 years),

8th November (13–18 years)

SCHOLARSHIP EXAMS 2015 – 17th January (11+/13+ Academic and St Francis Xavier Award)

Open Mornings

Thurs 9th & Mon 13th OctoberGuided tours available 10am - 12noon

Co-educational 3 - 13 day school

Strong 11+ and 13+ results

Rigorous academic standards

Excellent pastoral care

Key intake points at Kindergarten,

Reception, Year 3 and Year 7.

Barrow Hills SchoolRoke Lane, Witley, Surrey GU8 5NY01428 683639 | www.barrowhills.org.uk

barrow_spec.indd 1 18/7/14 10:15:40

“ Lancing College is an inspirational place. Its guiding

”

DOMINIC OLIVER, HEAD MASTER From September 2014

”

Lancing College is an inspirational place. Its guidingLancing College is an inspirational place. Its guidingLancing College is an inspirational place. Its guiding

Contact our Admissions Officer for more details on 01273 465805 or visit our website

www.lancingcollege.co.ukTel 01273 465805 West Sussex BN15 0RWAN INDEPENDENT SCHOOL FOR BOYS AND GIRLS AGED 13 TO 18

Registered Charity Number: 1076483

Only one hour from London on the Sussex Downs

Open Morning Saturday 4 October 2014



When I think back to history lessons at school, the predominant focus was always on war. From the Battle of Hast-ings to the Battle of Agincourt, the Cru-sades to Nazi Germany, the curriculum

seemed jammed full of stories about aggressive military affairs. Fascinating, but it was a relief to reach sixth form and discover another way to study the past — through a cultural lens, via the history of art.

History of art is often viewed derisively in the UK. It’s almost ignored by the state system, yet is offered by many independent schools. Because of this, it’s seen as a ‘posh’ choice, in much the same way classics is. A- level history of art is available at only 17 state secondary schools out of more than 3,000, plus a further 15 sixth-form colleges. By contrast, more than 90 independent schools offer it.

There’s no particular reason why history of art should be confined to independent schools — but for a long while it has been, and as a result, pupils from the pri-vate sector dominate university courses in the subject. Things aren’t helped by Kate Middleton (who studied history of art at Marlborough College and then at St Andrew’s) standing in front of Paul Emsley’s hopeless

portrait of her in the National Portrait Gallery, saying it’s ‘brilliant… Amazing… Absolutely brilliant.’ Nice girls saying nice things about paintings that aren’t nice shouldn’t be the point of the subject. It’s a meaty one, when it’s allowed to be.

This is something which many of Britain’s independ-ent schools recognise. Offering history of art allows them to include topics on the curriculum that traditional his-tory lessons scoot round — the Belle Epoch, say, seen through the work of the Impressionists, or the Reform-ation, as examined through the Dutch Golden Age.

At Wellington College, pupils are trained to under-stand both their visual cultural heritage and the imag-es generated by the modern world around them. They focus on ensuring that students are visually literate, and are set up for life in an increasingly image-centred world. Even students who don’t take history of art for A Level are aware of the discipline, thanks to art-focused assem-blies built into the termly schedule.

At Westminster School, where they offer a Pre-U course, pupils are introduced to key artistic and histor-ical moments from ancient Egypt to the present day. This includes an examination of both western and non-western artefacts. This holistic attitude is quite differ-

Private passionLara Prendergast says it’s a shame that the study of history of art fails to flourish in state schools

Lara on history of art_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 20 28/8/14 15:20:54


ent to the more piecemeal approach of many standard history courses. Benjamin Walton, head of history of art at Westminster, explains that this broad overview is combined with a far more focused second part — an examination of three historical periods: medieval, Ital-ian Renaissance and late 19th/early 20th western Euro-pean art. Study visits and a 3,000-word thesis tie all this together, creating a rigorous academic syllabus that is a particularly valuable experience for university.

Study visits are one of the most rewarding aspects of taking history of art. The halcyon days of the Grand Tour may be behind us, but many of Britain’s independent schools keep the flame alive. At places like Eton, Win-chester and Godolphin & Latymer, students are invited to go on foreign trips that complement the course. Key hubs like Venice, Florence, Paris and Rome are popular, although more far-flung places like Istanbul and New York are sometimes included. There is much to be said for trips that allow pupils to get up close to objects. One girl from Marlborough fondly remembers an afternoon spent in the San Marco convent in Florence: ‘It wasn’t till you saw Fra Angelico’s frescoes in their original loca-tion that you began to understand how these contempla-tive paintings fitted into a simple monastic lifestyle.’

Foreign visits can be particularly helpful with architecture and sculpture. ‘Baroque architecture would have been tricky to get my head around without having visited Rome,’ says a pupil who studied history of art at Westminster. That said, for many, fond memories aren’t solely about the art; after a long day traipsing through a city, a glass of wine with fellow pupils and teachers can be just as memorable.

The best history of art courses will not only rely on this kind of extravagant trip, though. Britain is stuffed with all sorts of intriguing artefacts, and a course that only focuses on foreign collections is a dubious one. Visits to British museums and galleries can be just as enlightening. ‘The small-scale outings in London and elsewhere were actually far more important education-ally than the big New York trip we went on,’ says a pupil who studied at Latymer Upper. ‘They allowed us to focus on individual works better, and were much more useful than charging around big foreign galleries, trying to make sure we saw everything.’

Take the National Gallery, home to one of the finest collections of art in the world. A good teacher can use it to introduce students to a broad range of artistic move-ments — from 14th-century early-Renaissance works to the flamboyance of the Rococo.

It is a shame that there’s so little recognition of this in the state sector — it does a disservice to students. Teach-ers could focus on art housed in Britain and still give an exceptional understanding of the subject. The legacy of centuries of British collecting, building and philanthropy has endowed this country with a mighty hoard of art. The study of this is an advantage that the independent sector continues to retain over the state system.

‘Baroque architecture would have been tricky to get my head around without visiting Rome’

Day, full & weekly boarding GSA School 900 girls 4-18 years

Founded 1885

w w w. s t c a t h e r i n e s . i n f oBramley, Guildford, Surrey GU5 0DF t: 01483 899609 e: [email protected]

StCatherine’sB r a m l e yOPEN MORNINGS

11th September8th October14th November

Boarders’

Friday

evening bus service

to London

thespectator01 July 2014.indd 1 11/07/2014 15:56:22

Igniting bright sparks at

engineer

academic

scientist

architectjournalist

entrepreneur

lawyer

�nancier

actor

artistsurgeon

teacher

composer

e | [email protected] t | 01280 818205 w | www.stowe.co.uk

Lara on history of art_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 21 28/8/14 15:20:55

How many times have you heard young people described as the indebted generation, weighed down by student loan repayments and soaring accommodation costs? Yet plan ahead and there is no reason why your children or grandchildren

shape. It is never too early to start saving and investing for a child, but there are two vital questions to ask yourself before you start putting money aside: what are you investing for, and over what timescale?

INVESTING FOR YOUR CHILD’S ADULT LIFE?There is no better way of teaching your children the discipline of saving and investing throughout life than by opening a pension. Put a small amount of money in every month and they can watch it grow, hopefully adding to it themselves or through their employer when they reach adulthood. As with an adult pension there is no need to worry about paying tax. Not only that, pension contributions to the child’s pension attract tax relief similar to the adult equivalent, meaning that for every £100 you put in the taxman will add another £25. Higher rate relief is unlikely to be available. There are, however, a couple of caveats with saving in a pension: there is a maximum of £3,600 gross per annum that can be paid in to a children’s pension and your child will not be able to access the money until he or she reaches the minimum pension age, which will be linked to 10 years below the state pension age.

WANT TO PAY YOUR CHILDREN’S UNIVERSITY FEES?Junior ISAs do not offer tax-relief on the contributions, but as with pensions they provide an environment in which your children’s savings and investments can

can invest up to £4,000 in a Junior ISA. The money can be put on deposit, earning interest, or if you are more adventurous, invested in the stock market via funds, investment trusts or the shares of individual companies. Or, indeed, the money can be split between different holdings. If you are investing in the shares of individual companies you will soon discover the wisdom of spreading your risk between different investments, as shares can rise or fall and if anyone had a foolproof way of knowing which they would quickly become the richest person on Earth! Money saved through a Junior ISA can be accessed by your child from the age of 18 onwards, making them a good way to pay university tuition fees, but not suitable for paying school fees.

SAVING FOR YOUR CHILDREN’S SCHOOL FEES?For many parents the cost of meeting school fees is of most immediate concern. It is not possible to use a Junior ISA to pay fees, but parents can of course use

their own ISA allowance, which has just been raised to £15,000 a year. Alternatively, you can invest in stocks and shares outside an ISA. Children’s savings accounts provide another option. Children, like adults, enjoy a tax-free personal allowance of £10,000 this tax year, although funds gifted by parents where the income exceeds £100 gross per annum will be taxed on the parent (this does not apply to grandparents). It is also worth having a look at National Savings and Investments, the government’s savings bank. Children’s Savings Bonds currently pay a rate of 2.5 per cent, which is competitive compared to what you might receive from banks’ and building societies’ savings

it is possible to access the money sooner at a cost of 90 days interest.

effectively being eroded year on year. One way you can

issues are made from time to time but with so many people chasing an elusive real return on their money they tend to sell out quickly.

FINANCIAL EDUCATIONOf course, there will come a time when your children

savings and investments. For many young people, this can be a daunting prospect for which they are ill equipped. Financial awareness is slowly creeping its way up the political agenda and from September this

the national curriculum for 11-16 year olds. At Rathbones

educate young people about the importance of saving, how to budget and how to avoid excessive debt. So far, over 1,000 young people have attended one of our

You can download a copy of our young persons

- here: http://www.rathbones.com/young-people/

If you do nothing else, making sure your children

as they start to manage their own money.

A DV E RT I S I N G F E AT U R E

ADVERT - Rathbones_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 22 28/8/14 15:05:43


The problem with going green, I’m told, is that it often means spending a great deal of money on lots of equipment that could at any moment be rendered obsolete. When it comes to renewable energy, scepticism

abounds. But the outcome of this cynicism is that our efforts to be greener have been incremental at best, and symbolic at worst. Just before I left school seven years ago we were told that all bedrooms were to be fitted

with low-energy light bulbs. The school would reduce its carbon footprint a trifle, while also saving a bit of money (or vice versa). I remember thinking at the time that this was less an initiative than a gesture — a head-fake towards social responsibility to soothe their conscience.

The fact remains, though, that going green, really green, is still a pressing obligation that institutions can ill-afford to ignore.

What can be said, then, of a small boarding school attempting, at one stroke, to reduce its annual carbon emissions by nearly 70 per cent, and all without spending a penny? I speak of St Mary’s Shaftes-bury, a Catholic girls’ school in 55 acres of Wiltshire which this summer set in motion the most thorough green initiative ever attempted by an independent Brit-ish school.

Its transformation will be extreme, to say the least. The main building and estate of St Mary’s date back to

It is easy being green Johnnie Kerr on how one school’s efforts to overhaul its ancient heating system will end up saving both energy and money

Going green remains a pressing obligation that schools cannot afford to ignore

HulTON ArCHIve/geTTy ImAgeS

Johhnie Kerr_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 23 28/8/14 15:22:40

24 guIde TO INdepeNdeNT SCHOOlS | 6 SepTember 2014 | IN ASSOCIATION WITH rATHbONeS

the 1880s, and since that time very few of its energy facil-ities have undergone what you might call ‘diligent mod-ernisation’. Off the grid for gas, the school has had to rely instead on oil and LPG (liquid petroleum gas) for decades. Many of its boilers were installed in the 1960s.

All this is about to change. When the girls of St Mary’s return for the Christmas term, they’ll find themselves in one of the greenest schools in the country, its roofs replete with solar panelling and its buildings heated by a vast biomass boiler.

The solution of switching to alternative fuel to save on costs originated, naturally enough, with the school’s bursar, Louis Tuson, who, on his arrival three years ago was faced with a decision of what to do about the school’s alarmingly antiquated energy set-up. ‘There were 19 boilers on site, some of them over 40 years old,’ he explains, ‘all of various ages and requiring quite a lot of maintenance, with the replacements’ significant capi-tal cost always on the horizon.’ To the man charged with making all this cost-efficient, it must have seemed an almost insoluble problem.

Small wonder, then, that the solution Tuson hit upon was so far-reaching. ‘Looking at the place with a fresh pair of eyes,’ he recalls, ‘carrying on as we were — we would have had to spend a lot of money buying new oil-fired boilers — you had to ask, is that logical in the cur-rent climate? And it seemed to me that we ought to be doing something radically different.’ He had no idea at the time just how radical this overhaul would become, or how easily he would hit on the answer. Almost immedi-ately, as he began looking into the murky, often maligned world of biomass boilers, he was put in touch with a com-pany which promised to exceed his requirements extrav-agantly, and all at no cost whatsoever.

Anesco, whose website proclaims to be ‘the UK’s leading energy efficiency services company’, is not a charitable group. Its profits are recouped from the sav-ings it provides its clients. It offers a model which, as the company’s founder Adrian Pike explains, ‘enables organisations to reduce their energy expenditure while improving the efficiency of their buildings… without the need for capital outlay. It’s perfect for schools like St Mary’s which have high energy demands across mul-tiple buildings.’ What’s more, the scheme had been well proven. ‘We have helped many schools to improve their energy efficiency,’ Pike tells me. St Mary’s, though, is the first independent school to submit to this model, and the ‘tailored upgrades’ currently being installed, entirely at the cost of Anesco’s investors, are impressive.

They include a gigantic 995kW biomass boiler (the largest to be installed in the country this year) that will reduce the school’s gas and oil costs by up to 70 per cent. Solar PV panelling is being laid extensively over the school’s rooftops, as well as an unused field in the grounds, and the lights will be switched to LED lamps, all of which will provide 20 per cent of the school’s future electricity requirements.

Even considering the outmoded conditions St Mary’s is emerging from, the projected figures are staggering. The school expects to achieve a reduction in carbon emis-sions of 69 per cent (a reduction of 847 tonnes) annually,

which should cut its energy bill by up to 55 per cent in the first year. ‘[Anesco] say the levels of CO2 reductions are the best they’ve achieved, and they’ve done a lot of this,’ says Tuson, ‘and I know they’re quite keen now to expand further and do it elsewhere.’ In fact, the school is hosting an Industry Day on 31 October where Anesco intend to show off their achievements to investors and potential customers.

But in exhibiting its newfound efficiency, St Mary’s is keen to promote more than just the economic benefits of its upheaval. The expectation is that its success will serve as an example of what can be achieved. Nor are its meas-ures purely practical. Their most enduring consequence, it’s hoped, will be to illustrate the extraordi-nary possibilities of green energy both to the local community and, crucially, to its pupils.

‘That’s equally important,’ says Tuson. ‘It’s about try-ing to encourage behavioural changes, as well as just trying to solve the issue with technology. It’s working already. Since we’ve started this and started talking about it, a number of girls have come out of the wood-work and said, “We’re interested in this, it’s the world we’re going to grow up in.” It’s very relevant.’

Green fever at St Mary’s is quickly becoming a major feature of school life. Awareness of the initiative has already been stepped up in science and geography lessons. ‘Smart metering’ screens are being installed to illustrate to the girls exactly how energy is distrib-uted, encouraging the boarding houses to compete to be the most efficient. A radical recycling initiative was introduced last term, with the enviable appointment of ‘Waste Monitors’ in every house, which has already brought the total waste recycled by the school to an esti-mated 95 per cent.

If all this seems too good to be true, I must admit that as my interview with Tuson drew to a close, I couldn’t help being a little doubtful. Surely there must be some sort of flipside? ‘Not at all,’ he tells me, with insouciance. ‘There are some practical risks. The truck that delivers the woodchip is particularly large. We’re not used to that size of truck coming onto the estate and we’ll have to trim some trees to make it possible, but that’s all pretty trivial really. Nothing that can’t be managed.’

And there, I suppose, you have it. Astonishing as it may seem, St Mary’s Shaftesbury has solved in three years an energy problem that has dogged it for decades. If all goes as expected, in 19 years the savings the school will have made with its new equipment will have reward-ed the investors of Anesco for installing and maintain-ing that equipment; and, if there’s any justice, St Mary’s will have been hailed as a pioneer of green ingenuity. The most impressive thing about the school’s strategy, however, is not the extent of its accomplishments, but the courageous vision of its governors in undertaking it in the first place. It can’t have been an easy decision, but its effect has been extraordinary. Their school appears to have leapt from the 19th to the 21st century in one mighty bound.

Green fever at St Mary’s is quickly becoming a major feature of school life

Johhnie Kerr_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 24 28/8/14 15:22:40


OPEN MORNING | SATURDAY 20 SEPTEMBER 2014OPEN EVENING | TUESDAY 7 OCTOBER 2014

SIXTH FORM AND BOARDING | BY APPOINTMENT

[email protected] +44 (0)20 8633 9935www.whitgift.co.uk/opendays

One of Britain’s finest independent day and boarding schools for boys aged 10-18

Whitgift.

Haling Park, South Croydon, CR2 6YT, United Kingdom

‘Some might say it’s just bricks and mortar. Others may say it’s just a school. But Whitgift is so much more than that’Old Whitgiftian (2006–2014)

1,300 boys and girls aged 4-18 who are taught in single-sex classes at key stages of their education.

Established in 1834, Forest School is located on the very edge of Epping Forest and is the only diamond structure school in London.

Open DaySaturday 20 September 2014

8.30am-1.30pm

[email protected]

020 8520 1744

The Spectator (Sept).indd 1 13/08/2014 10:24:00

Co-educational Boarding and Day (ages 13 – 18)

t: +44 (0)1684 581 515e: [email protected]

www.malverncollege.org.uk

Open MorningSaturday 11th October

10.15 am – 1.45 pm



Earlier this year I attended my first Independ-ent Schools Bursars Association conference. Perhaps it was because it was in Harrogate, Herriot Country — but I couldn’t help notic-ing a severe case of ‘All Creatures Great and

Small’. Bursars certainly come in a bewildering varie-ty of breeds — some are preened, some are plumped and some are rather more unkempt; some are starting to creak a little around the edges and some are spring chickens, while sizes vary from Chihuahua to Saint Ber-nard (complete with flask of brandy). I even spotted one fellow who was the spitting image of Mrs Pumphrey’s pampered Pekinese, Tricki-Woo. Yet, despite the enor-mous diversity, we most definitely have one thing in common: we are all passionate about our schools and the education that they provide.

The bursar’s role, with the help of our teams, is to provide a safe and well maintained campus, financial acumen and good planning. As Sir John Jones, the keynote speaker in Harrogate, wise-ly noted, what a parent wants above all else is a school where their children can be safe, make friends and be happy. It is the duty of each and every member of a school’s staff to ensure that they make this happen.

We, as bursars, are very aware of the immense financial sacrifices parents make in order to send their children to an independent school. Fees have increased at a faster rate than wage inflation for many years, which is due to many factors, including an increase in consumer expectations. As a pupil at Radley College in the 1980s I lived cheerfully in pretty basic cir-cumstances. There was a thriving black market economy for secondhand desks, posters, lamps and drapes. One year I even had to provide my own carpet. Quite rightly, nobody would put up with this today (and I am sure that subsequent bursars at Radley have changed things).

Our customers also desire smaller class sizes and more educational support staff. Furthermore, the costs of meeting regulatory requirements, fuel bills, staff pen-sion contributions, IT provision and maintaining grand old estates have all rocketed. This has priced many of

More than just paying the billsMark Milling on the role of a modern school bursar

Milling_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 26 28/8/14 15:23:29


our traditional customers out of the market for private education. This is a great shame, and is also a risk to the future of the independent sector.

So what can we do to reduce this affordability gap? Well, a bursar obviously needs to ensure that money received in fees is spent in the most efficient manner possible. Schools also have to make the most of the com-mercial opportunities that their estates can provide in terms of lettings, summer schools, Easter revision cours-es and so on. At the same time we must not forget our charitable status and our obligations and desires to pro-vide public benefit. This is a difficult balancing act.

We should also try to become more American in our approach to raising funds from alumni and other stake-holders. These are vital in financing both capital projects and bursaries to maintain our support to hard-pressed parents and to give top-class pupils from deprived back-grounds access to a transformational education. At Lanc-ing College we are lucky enough to have over an acre of land per pupil. Our incredible chapel and Oxbridge-style quads provide inspiration and awe to pupils from all walks of life and from around the globe. Our Founda-tion Office is working hard to ensure that this glorious estate is around for another 150 years. More and more independent schools are starting to realise the value of relationship-building with alumni, but the results can take many years to come to fruition.

We must also make the most of advances in technol-ogy to drive efficiency. The use of smart devices, innova-

tive software and the internet in education is accelerating at a phenomenal rate, and we must focus on how we can use these to best effect.

When it comes to the fabric of the estate, most schools are not blessed with significant endowments. These establishments will have to be brave, and not get too carried away with the facilities arms-race. Of course we need to provide opportunities and quality activities to our pupils, but a £1 million sports hall is as much fun to run around in as a £10 million one. Sometimes schools focus too much on appealing to parents when it is the children who spend time there — and they often have very dif-ferent wants and wishes.

Furthermore, I am convinced that parents are starting to admire schools which are brave enough to lay prestige projects aside and focus on their core product — a top-class edu-cation in a pleasant environment with plenty of extra-curricular opportunities, while ensuring their pupils are safe and happy.

After all, what is it that we remember from our school days? It is our inspirational teachers, our mad experienc-es, our friends, our access to space and support and intel-ligent adult guidance. Of course there need to be clear rules and boundaries, but the pupil needs to be trusted, treated with respect, kept safe, smiled at and listened to. That way each child will succeed and flourish.

As a pupil at Radley in the 1980s, I lived cheerfully in pretty basic circumstances

Every dayexceptional

Leading girls’ education

At the GDST, we focus on bringing out the best in your daughter.

We pride ourselves in creating a learning environment speci�cally designed and dedicated to the development of con�dent, courageous, composed and committed girls. And with a leading network of 24 schools and two academies providing independent day schools for girls aged 3-18, there’s a school that can help your daughter achieve success and make a difference to the world.

gdst.net

twitter.com/gdst

facebook.com/thegdst

GDST advertSpectator 110mmX180mm.v3.indd 1 07/08/2014 12:21:29

Milling_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 27 28/8/14 15:23:29


When the late, great Ronald Searle and Geoffrey Willans conspired to create St Trinian’s and Nigel Molesworth, the archetypal English prep school boy, they wanted to evoke an air of austere,

post-war gloom.Molesworth’s school, St Custard’s, was, in his own

words, ‘built by a madman in 1836’. For both St Custard’s and St Trinian’s, Searle plumped for a grim, early Goth-ic Revival style, all inky, glowering crockets and pinna-cles. His choice of Gothic was inspired by his wartime service when he was stationed in Kirkcudbright in 1940. There he met two schoolgirls, evacuated from a school called St Trinnean’s, Edinburgh, an OTT exercise in high Scottish Gothic. ‘I prefer Renaissance architecture, but the gloom of Gothic suited my work better,’ said Searle, ‘I misspelt it by accident — St Trinnean was an ancient saint — and it stuck.’

Austere gloom was certainly still the prevailing mood in my school days in the 1970s and 1980s. West-minster School may have been expensive — although a lot less expensive in real terms than it is today, at £10,830 a term for board-ers. But it also retained an echo of St Custard’s — not just in the crockets and pinnacles of neighbouring West-minster Abbey, but also in a thread-bare echo of that post-war austerity. Living standards were appropriate-ly monastic in the shadow of the Abbey. We stuck milk bottles out on the ledge of our day room to keep them cool. What would have been the point of a fridge? Thirteen-year-old boys don’t need fancy, new-tan-gled devices to satisfy their plain, brutish tastes.

Lunch wasn’t much better. We lived off buttered toast to com-pensate for the sub-optimal school food. At one particularly uninspiring meal, a friend of mine complained to the school chef that his roast lamb was sweating. ‘You’d sweat if you were put in an oven for three hours,’ barked the chef.

Yes, the surroundings were impossibly grand — not in terms of opulence, but when it came to his-tory. That day room was in one of the first Palladian buildings in the coun-try, designed by Lord Burlington in the early 18th century. The gym was in a medieval corner of the abbey cloister.

But those surroundings were agreeably run down. The vault-ing horse in the gym was almost as ancient as the cloister. The school’s

second-hand bookshop — which I ran out of a broom cupboard by the bogs — was full of dog-eared novels encrusted with generations of unfunny schoolboy graf-fiti.

The austere days of the great British public school are gone now. Russian oligarchs and American hedge-funders want today’s Nigel Molesworths to have their own centrally heated studies and artificially cooled milk. That’s one of the reasons private education has moved beyond the reach of the children of middle-class pro-fessionals. But, also, something more than affordable school fees has been lost along the way.

I’m not arguing for a return to sepia-tinted school-days, where you were grateful to be beaten within an inch of your life by frustrated, unhappy men in mortar-boards and gowns. And I can’t claim that Westminster made me more resilient, like the Marlborough-educated subject of one second world war anecdote. This man, like

Hard timesWhy are the greatest schools in literature so steeped in Gothic severity? By Harry Mount

getty imAges

Harry Mount_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 28 28/8/14 16:15:41


Ronald Searle, was imprisoned by the Japanese during the war. When he turned up at the gruesome jail, he was greeted by an old schoolfriend.

‘What’s it like here?’ said the worried new arrival.‘Oh, not too bad. Much better than Marlborough,

anyway.’ But that combination of a brilliant education in beau-

tiful surroundings and material discomfort did produce a useful lesson in life’s priorities — that medieval build-ings and Ancient Greek verbs are more important than Louis Vuitton pencil cases and Versace underpants. And, these days, I would still prefer to stay in a windowless dive in a pension by Termini Railway Station in Rome than in the Hotel Schloss Uberluxy on some remote, sun-blasted, cultureless beach.

It’s not that I actively prefer discomfort in some wacko hairshirt way, more that I don’t mind it that much. And that’s the best lesson of childhood deprivation in exalted, cultured surroundings: you like looking at pal-aces; you don’t expect to live in one — even if you find that that’s precisely where some of your more exalted school friends end up living.

The funny thing is that public schools in literature remain unremittingly bleak today, as if the comfort rev-olution had never taken place. Harry Potter’s Hogwarts might just as well be St Trinian’s or St Custard’s, for all its Gothic chill. In fact, a rival school called Hogwarts does actually appear in the 1954 Molesworth volume, How to be Topp. St Cus-tard’s is regularly beaten at football by Hogwarts and their other deadly rivals, Porridge Court. And, in his wise words on Latin lessons, Molesworth writes,

Sometimes they think they will trick you into liking lat. by having a latin pla. Latin plas are like this:

THE HOGWARTSby

MARCUS PLAUTUS MOLESWORTHUS

Hogwarts could hardly be gloomier, with its bristling thickets of crenellated towers, the Black Lake and the Forbidden Forest. How richly Gothic to have a school owlery, where pupils keep their own owls.

Today, no real public school comes close to match-ing the medieval gloom of Hogwarts. J.K. Rowling, born in 1965, must have been feeding off the boarding school literature of her childhood — from St Custard’s to Billy Bunter’s Greyfriars School, from Jennings’s Lin-bury Court to Winker Watson’s Greytowers Boarding School.

It is from the austerity and bleakness of these places — sometimes exaggerated, sometimes not — that the humour and the mischief of those school stories was born. Somehow I think today’s ultra-comfortable public schools won’t produce the same literary gold dust. As the great Nigel Molesworth is prone to say, ‘It is all an uter chiz.’

Harry Mount is the author of How England Made the English (Viking).

It is funny that public schools in literature are still bleak. Take Harry Potter’s Hogwarts

Independent Day School for Girls from 4-18 yearsQueen’s Gate School offers girls a friendly, supportive environment,

where individuality is nurtured, academic standards are high and where a broad based curriculum ensures a well rounded education.

For a prospectus, or to make a private visit to the School, please contact the Registrar Miss Janette Micklewright, on

020 7594 4982 or email, [email protected]

www.queensgate.org.uk

Queen’s Gate Junior School125-126 Queen’s Gate London SW7 5LJ

Queen’s Gate Senior School131-133 Queen’s Gate London SW7 5LE

QG_spec_2.indd 1 18/8/14 17:12:25

Harry Mount_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 29 28/8/14 16:15:41


We are committed to offering an outstanding education for all, regardless of income. We have a wide choice of subjects, excellent teaching and results, personal guidance and a friendly, supported learning environment.

For more information on assistance with school fees, please contact the Bursar.

IB Diploma and A Level

A prospectus can be obtained by telephoning the

Godolphin Latymer&

For further information contact:[email protected]

The Godolphin and Latymer School

London W6 0PGTel: 020 8741 1936 Fax: 020 8735 9520Registered Charity No. 312699www.godolphinandlatymer.com

Spectator Education Ad 2013.indd 1 28/02/2013 09:21

CATHOLIC

WE ARE DOWNSIDE

BOARDINGSCHOOL

CO–ED

[email protected] 01761 235103Stratton-on-the-Fosse Bath BA3 4RJ

www.downside.co.uk

d

ownsid

e

AT

STR

ATTON-ON-THE-FOSS

E

18142014

ACADEMIC

Next Open Day Saturday 20th September Please contact the admissions to book your place

hurtwoodhouse.com

HOUSE

BOARDING SCHOOL FOR THE

HURTWOOD

THE CREATIVE & PERFORMING

ARTSUntitled-1 1 13/12/2012 15:15

hurt_spec.indd 1 28/2/13 10:52:04

An outstanding education for a bright future

AUTUMN OPEN MORNINGSaturday 20 September 2014Saturday 11 October 2014

Boarding and day for boys and girls, 4 to 13 yearsDragon School, Oxford

INVITATIONS T: 01865 315405E: [email protected]

Learn



The two great regrets of middle age are: ‘I never learnt a language’ and ‘I never learnt an instrument’. One of my regrets is that, because I was a happy-go-lucky sort of chap at school, my music teachers kept giving me

heavier and heavier cases to carry.They started me on the trumpet. That was fine; I could

hide away in the brass section and camouflage my errors among the better players. But then they moved me to the euphonium. ‘We need one of those, Newton. Get practis-ing.’ I could just about cope with the euphonium. But then came the final call. Your school needs you. The orchestra expects. ‘We need a tuba, and you’re the man!’

I was suddenly armed and dangerous. As the only tuba

player in the wind band, any error I committed was both prominent and unmissable. Eyes would turn to the scruffy boy at the back as he knocked out a sharp instead of a flat and — on one memorable occasion — added an extra note to a bar. That would have been fine, except that it was the last bar. The conductor’s hand had stopped. The flutes were practically packing away. The violins were planning their night out, and I was rewriting a Gershwin classic. Embarrassed? You betcha.

So when offered the chance to fade away and hand over this most toxic of briefs, I grabbed the chance to stop.

And that was it. I had proudly won an undistinguished pass at Grade Three. I had ruined modern music for 200 spectators, and had endured a thoroughly lonely and mis-erable time. Job done.

Then, middle age struck. One summer’s day, in my present job as headmaster of Taunton School, I was visit-ing the prep school music building and noticed the music store had been left open. At the back was a very large instrument case. Flashback. My palms moistened. There was my nemesis.

But then another thought came to me: why not have another go? This time, I would do it my way. I might even enjoy it. I would buy some music and play to my heart’s content. So what if my kids complained and the masonry crumbled? The time had come to right a wrong, and to prove that I could do it.

Next thing I knew, ambition began to grow. Grade Three in 1979. Why not Grade Four, or even Five, in 2013? Let’s buy the music and find out. And what did I find? I loved it. Simply adored it. At certain moments, I was an insult to tuba players everywhere, but when it was good, it was great. I was Hendrix with valve oil.

I am lucky enough to be married to a very accom-plished musician. My wife plays every Sunday in church, to pieces arranged by our very talented music director. I quavered — because that is about as fast as I could play — and finally asked him to arrange some music so that we could see whether I could add lustre and depth to the worshipful music making.

Mistakes? I have certainly made a few, but I have been disturbing the prayerful silences and wrecking the godly intonations of St James’s church for 18 months now. Each week is a trial because the instrument, rather like my iPad, seems to have a mind of its own. Shifting several cubic metres of air through brass pipes is not the easiest of things and I still do squeak from time to time. But the sense of satisfaction from playing something right is still a thrill, and the sense of being part of a very different kind of team is moving.

As for Grade Five? I got a distinction — by the skin of my teeth. But not before facing a lone examiner in a cav-ernous music room for 20 minutes. My word, our pupils are brave to do that.

As for the future: I sit by the phone hoping for the call from the Brighouse and Rastrick Band, or even the prep-school wind band. Maybe one day it will come. In the meantime, I busked for charity with two fellow headmas-ters in Taunton High Street at Christmastime two years ago. We raised £300 in an hour for the homeless, so the tuneless helped the homeless. Not bad for a middle-aged man with, now, a little less regret than before.

Pipe dreamsThe tuba defeated John Newton as a schoolboy. Now, as a headmaster, he’s taking it on again

geTTy ImAgeS

Tuba_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 31 28/8/14 16:16:02


For a centre-right political party, the Conserv-atives are oddly obsessed with where people went to school. Michael Gove and Lady Warsi both lamented the number of Old Etonians in influential positions earlier this year. It may not

have been coincidence that, within five months, both had moved posts: there remains a potent undercurrent of class tension in today’s Conservative party.

The charge sheet is simple. David Cameron has

stacked the corridors of power with those who share his black-and-turquoise old school tie. How can it be that British politics has regressed into the chumocracy days of Harold Macmillan? Yet the prominence of Old Eto-nians today is not a throwback to an era that we thought we’d left behind — it’s a last hurrah.

Here are some facts to mollify those who despair at David Cameron and his ruling clique. When Winston Churchill returned to power in 1951, he led a party with 76 Old Etonian MPs. There are only 19 in David Cam-eron’s Conservative party today, and the number will be further depleted when Sir George Young and James Arbuthnot both step down as MPs at the next election. Rather than being stronger than ever, as the convention-al wisdom assumes, the role of Old Etonians in British politics may be in inexorable decline.

The fall in the number of Old Etonian MPs reflects a wider trend. Despite all the calls to bring back the blue-collar conservatism of John Major, in fact 60 per cent of Tories in 1992 were independently educated, compared with 54 per cent today. The number is even lower for the 2010 Conservative intake and parliamentary candidates for 2015. In 1951, 78 per cent of Tories had attended pri-vate schools; 72 per cent of the 1979 intake also did so. This is one of the forgotten stories of the modern Con-servative party: the dramatic reduction in the power of the old school tie.

That may seem incongruous given the lack of diver-sity in today’s cabinet. It is highly awkward for the Con-servatives that their front bench can be caricatured as an all-white, privately educated men-only zone. And yet there have never been so few Old Etonian MPs.

Tony Little, the soon-to-retire headmaster of Eton, is aware of the trend. He suggests that the most funda-mental explanation is that ‘party politics is less attractive than once it was as a career option’: professional politics now wants for prestige and glamour. Students who are interested in politics ‘don’t necessarily focus on tradi-tional party politics’ any more, and look to Old Etonians like Justin Welby and Jonathon Porritt, the former direc-tor of Friends of the Earth, for examples of how to make a difference in public life in other ways.

Little also says that ‘the pummelling public figures receive in party political life’ has put the school’s old boys off the idea of trying to become MPs. He reckons that it could well be the case that a prestigious private education is now an impediment for would-be parlia-mentary candidates. And indeed Conservative constitu-ency associations in marginal seats might be sensible to discriminate in this way.

In Somerton and Frome, one of the Conservatives’ main target seats at the last election, the Tories recorded a swing well below national trends. That the candidate’s name was Annunziata Rees-Mogg (defying Mr Cam-eron’s orders to adopt the plainer ‘Nancy Mogg’) may not have helped. CCHQ will also have anxiously noted Ukip’s success at pitching itself as the antidote to the out-of-touch Tories.

Labour has followed a similar line of attack, some-thing made easier by the fact that it no longer has any Old Etonians in its parliamentary ranks. There is a rich

Tough luck, old boysContrary to public perception, there are ever fewer Old Etonians in Parliament, says Tim Wigmore

getty imAges

Tim Wigmore_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 32 28/8/14 16:17:53


tradition of Old Etonian socialism — George Orwell; Huge Dalton (chancellor in Clement Attlee’s govern-ment); and Tom Dalyell, the former Father of the House. Ever since Frederick Pethick-Lawrence was elected as Labour’s first Old Etonian MP in 1923, they have been popping up. No longer. In 2010, for the first time since 1923, not a single Old Etonian was returned as a Labour MP. None have so far been chosen as candidates for the 2015 general election either.

The start of the financial crisis in 2008 brought class back to the centre of British politics. In the Crewe and Nantwich by-election in 2008, Labour attacked the pri-vately educated Conservative candidate Edward Timp-son as ‘the Tarporley Toff’ and ‘Lord Snooty’. Although he was voted in nevertheless, it was a taste of things to come. Only 12 per cent of Labour’s MPs today are pri-vately educated, and the party believes that it’s on strong ground when it attacks the privileged backgrounds of leading Conservatives. It may be right. Polling evidence suggests that two thirds of voters think the Conserva-tives ‘care more about the rich and affluent than ordi-nary people’.

George Osborne knows how effective such attacks can be. With delicious irony, it was the Chancellor who devised Michael Howard’s jibe to Tony Blair: ‘This grammar school boy will take no lessons from that pub-lic school boy.’ When Conservatives use similar language today, it is reserved for blue-on-blue attacks. David Davis last year pleaded for ‘no more Old Etonian advisers’ at

No. 10, while Sarah Wollaston has also railed against an excess of Old Etonian school ties.

David Cameron is the only OE in the cabinet today, and no Conservative (or Conservative-dominated) administration has ever had a lower proportion of pri-vately educated people in ministerial posts. But the crit-ics do seem to have a point: Cameron seems disposed to favour those who come from a similar background when it comes to advisers. So it is that four of those involved in drafting the manifesto alongside the PM also went to his old school: Jo Johnson, brother of Boris and chair of the No. 10 policy board; Oliver Letwin, the minister for govern-ment policy; Ed Llewellyn, Cam-eron’s chief of staff; and Rupert Harrison, George Osborne’s chief of staff. Old Etonians may be a dying breed at Westmin-ster, but under Mr Cameron’s rule they are stubbornly retain-ing their influence. So the paradox is that while the Con-servative party is very definitely moving away from the old school tie, Mr Cameron is much less willing to do so. It will make the Old Etonians particularly easy to blame if the Tories lose the next election.

Ultimately, the real story is not that the Conservative party is in thrall to Etonians, but the strange phasing out of Old Etonians from power. Defying this trend may be a task beyond even Boris Johnson.

While the Tory party is moving away from the old school tie, Mr Cameron is much less willing to do so

Tel:01249 857200 Email: [email protected] www.stmaryscalne.org

St Mary’s Calne, Wiltshire, SN11 0DF

OPEN DAYS: 11th October & 15th November 2014,

31st January & 25th April 2015

ST MARY’S CALNEA TOP INDEPENDENT BOARDING & DAY SCHOOL FOR GIRLS AGED 11-18

01435 [email protected] Old Palace, Mayfield East Sussex TN20 6PHwww.mayfieldgirls.org

An independent Catholic boarding and day school for girls aged 11 to 18

Sixth Form Open Afternoon: Friday 19 SeptOpen Mornings: Thursday 18 Sept, Tuesday 4 Nov

Educating mind, body, heart & soul

‘Excellent Academic Achievement’

‘Excellent Pastoral Care’

‘Excellent spiritual, moral, social and cultural

development’ Inspectorate Report 2012

• New Sixth Form Centre• Oxbridge Success• Full & Weekly Boarding

Tim Wigmore_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 33 28/8/14 16:17:53


Most of our independent schools in Great Britain have a religious origin and the campuses of many are dominated by school chapels. The earliest surviving foundations, including Eton and Win-

chester, contain vestiges of their religious inspiration in their statutes and constitutions. Some of the older gram-mar schools began life as training places for develop-ing Protestantism, while the older Catholic schools were staffed by the religious orders notably Jesuits and Ben-edictines.

Many of today’s schools have, however, lost their overtly religious character and followed Oxford and Cambridge into a world where aca-demic success and ‘excellence’ are the dominant ideals. Religious elements remain in music and drama, but a

strong ethical foundation based on shared values seems to have largely disappeared. So has the marginalisation of the ‘faith’ element in education been a mistake?

This has become an important question for the inde-pendent sector as the debate on the subject becomes a national issue. The Prime Minister has made it clear that he believes England remains a Christian country, and Michael Gove has tried to single out those British values which make civil society possible. Such values are noto-riously difficult to pinpoint. The sometimes acrimonious debate on the nature of the curriculum for the teaching of

history has shown that the delicate balance of life in this country is more easily disturbed than described. What I am sure of is that British values would be pretty vacuous without their Christian background. Tolerance and fair play may make sense on the cricket field, but they only carry true authority when inspired by Gospel values.

Such questions have been much in mind over the last few months here at Downside, where as abbot of the monastic community of Benedictine monks and chairman of governors, I have been presiding over the bicentenary celebrations of our school. We were originally founded at Douai in Flanders 400 ago as an English monastery and school unable to practise its Catholicism in England. We were forced out of France in the 1790s precisely because we were English and returned to start anew. After a two-decade sojourn at Acton Burnell in Shropshire, the prop-erty at Downside was acquired and the modest farmhouse which was our first home is now engulfed in a massive array of buildings dominated by our abbey church. The church has been the focus of our celebrations this year reflecting its centrality in the life of Downside.

Among all of the networking and renewing of con-tacts that the celebrations have brought, something more important has emerged: the need to focus on why we are here, and what we are doing. The question of the school’s ethos has become more urgent not because of the religious composition of the school (which remains predominantly Catholic) but because of the appointment of Downside’s first lay headmaster, Dr James Whitehead. Can a Benedic-tine school remain a Benedictine school without a Ben-edictine headmaster?

The answer to this seems to be a firm ‘yes’, as the school has always maintained a firm commitment to the Catholic faith and its Benedictine identity. A Benedictine identity is not wishy-washy sales talk, but a golden thread which runs through all our activities. A humane, practical Christianity, a strong force for good in the world and the value of each individual in the school community is a clear expression of the Benedictine Rule.

St Benedict’s Rule was written in the sixth century AD by an Italian monk and abbot, but its kindly authority remains potent in today’s world. The Rule sees, in a deeply incarnated way, the reality of God’s loving intervention in all things. Within the encompassing Benedictine ideas of humility, listening and compassion, the true ethos of the school remains: our vocation to show kindness and love for all, our ultimate ambition to achieve eternal life, and our selfless love for others. All these practical values find their principal focus in our worship in the abbey church.

When the English Catholic independent schools were founded during the Reformation period, the debate on ‘English’ values was very strong, and it led at times to death and persecution. The English Catholics were the pariahs of their time and their values seemed to threaten the established order. Identities are never easy to define, but it is obvious that we need to articulate clearly what ‘traditional values’ are in today’s multicultural society. If the Christian voice is not heard, or not heard clearly, then others will ensure that their voices dominate. I am glad that I have come to a clearer understanding of the values and inspirations that make our school what it is — and I hope they will endure.

Keeping the flame aliveA religious ethos still makes a real difference in education, says Abbot Aidan Bellenger

The kindly authority of St Benedict’s rule remains potent in today’s world

getty imAges

Abbot of Downside_Spectator Schools Sept 2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260_ 34 28/8/14 15:29:37


27 Queen Square, Bath, BA1 2HX01225 334577 [email protected]

www.bathacademy.co.uk@BathAcademy www.facebook.com/Bath.Academy@BathAcademy www.facebook.com/Bath.Academy

GCSE’s, A Levels and re-sits

BATHACADEMY

Britain’s leading tutoring service provider with over 36 years experience. Quali�ed, experienced, enhanced-CRB checked tutors deliver personalised tuition programmes & excellent results. The Good Schools Guide recommended.

fleet_spec_new.indd 1 21/8/14 13:51:31Greens_specv2.indd 1 19/8/14 12:27:33

ash_qp.indd 1 8/7/14 11:07:16


The value of investments and income arising from them may fall as well as rise and you might get back less than you originally invested.

Rathbone Investment Management is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority.

Thinkingabout

investing forthe future?

Rathbones is one of the UK’s leading providers of investment management services to private

clients, charities and trusts.

Whether you are saving for your children’s education or your own retirement, we providea personalised investment management service designed to meet your individual requirements.

For more information, pleasecontact Christopher Dean on

020 7399 0088www.rathbones.com

@Rathbones1742

Rathbone Brothers Plc

Rathbone Brothers Plc

110996_Spectator Guide to Schools Ad_260x210_v2.indd 1 21/08/2014 14:09ADVERT - Rathbones_06-Sep-2014_Spectator Supplements 210x260 36 22/8/14 16:26:18

spectator independent schools supplement september 2014

Documents

lacrosse spectator

spectator schools

lacrosse scotland

school career

school magazines emily

spectator supplements

bursars life mark milling

public schools