Chronicle Summer 2024

14 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

An A Level English trip to All Souls College, Oxford

What have you most enjoyed about Teddies over the past three years? I have loved all of it! It’s the people who make Teddies so special, and Zannah and I have really enjoyed getting to know the community. Whether we have been having lunch with the new Shell, hosting the Upper Sixth for drinks in the Warden’s House on their eighteenth birthdays, welcoming teachers and support staff or groups of parents for informal suppers, or just talking to colleagues in the Quad and on the playing fields, it’s been wonderful to become part of this community. That takes time for anyone joining a new school - and it definitely takes longer if you start as Warden! – but it puts the fun into work and it makes all the work worthwhile. Of all the new developments at the School, which do you think have had the most positive impact on pupils’ experience of the School? Honestly, I think it’s the mobile phone policy. Not everyone will agree with that, but I think that it’s made a huge difference. More pupils

school, but they don’t want them to grow up cloistered away on a campus in the countryside. More parents like the idea of our curriculum for their children too: the fact that children in the Shell can choose their subjects, the option to take Pathways and Perspectives alongside GCSEs, the ability to decide between the IB and A level – they’re all real strengths. I think that more parents and pupils, especially in the Sixth Form, have liked what we have done with our location in Oxford – increasing the number of societies and visiting speakers, running more visits into Oxford, creating more opportunities for service just minutes away by bus or by bike. More than anything, I think we have been successful because more people have liked what they’ve heard about Teddies, and they’ve come to visit. And when they come to visit, they meet such positive, happy children and such inspiring, committed staff that they can really see themselves becoming part of our community. So much success in sport and so much brilliance in the arts – those things have really helped too!

biggest challenges on the horizon. We don’t yet know the details or the timings, but we know that those challenges are coming. We’ve been working hard to generate more commercial income – our revenue from lettings next year is budgeted to be 50% higher than it was two years ago and we’re working hard to sign our first contract for an international school. We’re also working hard to control all our costs. At the same time, we don’t want to compromise our pupils’ experience at Teddies. If it’s becoming more expensive, a Teddies education also needs to become even better, even more worth paying for. Why do you think St Edward’s is enjoying huge popularity now, more so than at any time in its history? I think the biggest factor is that more and more people are subscribing to our philosophy of education: they want their children to do very well academically, but they also want them to have fun at school; they want their children to have all the facilities and opportunities of a boarding