Chronicle Summer 2024

8 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

How is it continually strengthened and preserved? Culture takes years to build – and it’s not enough to preserve it. If you don’t keep building it, strengthening it, there’s a real risk that you’ll lose it. The most important part of my job as Warden is to bring people into the School who will not just embrace the Teddies culture but also want to develop it further. We have done a lot of work on values in the last three years too, and I think it’s made a real difference. We

How would you summarise academic developments since you and David Flower, Sub-Warden Academic, joined Teddies? How do they resonate with the wider world of university study and careers? I’d say first that academic developments and achievements come from everybody’s work, not just mine and David’s. If pupils aren’t thriving in the co-curriculum and happy at school, they won’t do well in their studies. There’s a huge super-curriculum for you to explore. Before you know it, you will be competing for your House in school debating challenges or taking a trip into Oxford to listen to pioneering professors of Physics. FIFI

more emphasis on the academic. We’ve told pupils that they need to work hard – “time equals grades” is one of my favourite phrases – and we have made sure that they all have time to do just that. It’s also about culture, and we have had huge success in building the academic culture in the last three years. The Oxford Lectures have really taken off: since September, eight Oxford Professors have given talks at Teddies. On average, that’s one every three weeks in Autumn and Spring. There have been many more Oxford Days of learning in the city, and we now have seven St Edward’s Fellows, postgraduate students from Oxford, working with

talk a lot about integrity, kindness and courage. But talk’s cheap, and it’s much more important to act, to take every decision with those values in mind. David Christie, the

our pupils and teachers. It’s getting harder beyond Teddies – harder to get into the best universities, harder to get the best jobs – so

11th Warden, gave me a present in my first year. It’s a framed quotation from Confucius, and it’s on the wall in the Warden’s House: “To see the right thing and not to do it is want of courage”. So you’ve got to be able to see what’s right and then be willing to do it – that’s how you strengthen and preserve the culture.

our emphasis on endeavour is absolutely right. It’s also getting harder to decide what to do:

pupils aren’t just choosing between UK universities. They’re choosing between

universities in North America and Europe too. The jobs that they’ll take afterwards are changing all the time, and very fast. Dr Claudia Ord has overseen a huge increase in our careers provision, and James Sinclair is our first Head of Overseas Applications – so whatever they want to do, pupils at Teddies will have Has the new focus on academic ambition meant that there is less time for all the other opportunities? Absolutely not. We haven’t just had our best ever exam results in the last three years. We’ve also had more success in sport than anyone can remember – the boys’ 1st VIII winning Henley and the girls’ coxed four winning championship gold at National Schools last year, the girls’ 1st VIII winning silver at National Schools this year to become the fastest school crew in the country, the boys’ 1st XV getting back into the Daily Mail’s top 30 schools for rugby, the best seasons anyone can remember for hockey and netball, the boys’ 1st XI reaching the quarter-final of the National T20 competition and the girls’ 1st XI finishing fourth in the same competition, the Under 14A boys winning the county cup. 744 pupils represented Teddies at sport this year, in nearly 900 all the advice that they need.

That’s why the partnership between Clare Hamilton as Sub-Warden and David Flower as Sub-Warden Academic is so important. But, to answer your question, my summary would be short and simple: academic developments have been extraordinary! I’d point to the obvious things, like last year’s record-breaking exam results and the incredibly high levels of value added. All the pupils at Teddies take a cognitive ability test when they start, which predicts how they should do in their exams. When they do much better, the gap is the value which their teachers have added – and that gap had never been bigger at Teddies than it was last summer. That’s partly about structures, and it’s absolutely true that we have put

Rowena Ritchie with pupil Ricky Li