Chronicle Spring 2022

5 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

Historians of the Month in November: Cecily Brown, Kaïa Christensen, Bella Darby, Evie Cullum, Xan Lytle and Charles Yang. Also selected for November but not pictured were Olivia Ainsleigh Jones and Elsa Hall

of pupils taking responsibility for their own learning. We are keeping that culture throughout the School, and especially in the Sixth Form, but we have put more structure into the Lower School. We have introduced a prep timetable and we have brought back prep diaries to make it easier for pupils to take responsibility for planning their work, and easier for their Tutors and their HMs to know that they are getting it done. The second part of scholarship is about interest in ideas, in developing a lifelong interest in the life of the mind. We have opened up the Academic Forum, so that it is accessible to everyone, and we have increased the number of opportunities in the super-curriculum, the debates and lectures taking place every week in the school calendar, and we have promoted them much more actively. Looking ahead to next year, we are looking to fill the programme in the evenings with talks by pupils, teachers and visiting speakers. We will also be launching a reading strategy, making time in the week for every pupil to read and making even greater use of the exceptional facilities in our Library.

Those two elements come together in the Honorary Academic Scholarships that we have introduced. We celebrated the first of those new awards in the last assembly of the Autumn Term, and we will do the same at the end of this term and next. It is inspiring for pupils to see academic industry and achievement celebrated, and to know that those and other honorary awards are available to them throughout their school careers. It is not all about scholarship though – excellence and service, the other two parts of our strategy are equally important. Scholarship, excellence and service – SES, just like St Edward’s School. It’s what we want to make Teddies famous for. How are you ensuring that all pupils can achieve their full academic potential? For me, it is not just about pupils fulfilling their potential, it’s not just about gaining excellent grades in exams. The most important part of a Teddies education is that pupils expand their potential while

they are here with us – and not just in their academic work but in other areas of school life too. On the academic side, there are two practical ways in which we do that – the first long-established and the second new. The first is about people. All our teachers work as Tutors, sharing with HMs the responsibility for monitoring pupils’ progress, for making sure that they are fulfilling all of their potential. We are going to make more time available for tutoring next year, so that there is enough time in the week for conversations about academic work. The second is about systems and about the way in which we can make better use of data. We are in the process of appointing a Lead Analyst, whose job it will be to make available – not only to Tutors but to every teacher – the information that we have about pupils’ progress. The Lead Analyst’s first task will be to build a sector- leading tracking and monitoring system, so that we can see when a pupil might be starting to fall short of their potential and start to talk with them and with their parents.