Chronicle Spring 2022

6 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

or representing your peers at a meeting of the new year-group forums, or speaking for your House at a meeting of the new Sustainability Committee, or working as a Prefect, a Head of House or a Peer Listener. Outside school – Beyond Teddies – it is about the programme for partnership work which is building up quickly. From September, all pupils in the Sixth Form will have 90 minutes in their timetables every week for partnership work in local primary schools, care homes and charities – and we are working on plans to provide similar opportunities for every year group in the next five years. You want to make more of our location in Oxford – how do you plan to do this? Those plans for our programmes for service are a good example – they wouldn’t be possible if we needed to travel 30 minutes in a minibus first! The greatest opportunity for us is academic, to make more of our proximity to the university. We are working on three initiatives. The first is a programme of Oxford Lectures across all departments, two-day residencies in the School for a visiting academic to lead workshops and to give lectures to pupils, staff and parents from Teddies and from other local schools. The second is the introduction of Oxford Days into our calendar, making time for every pupil, in every year group and in every subject, to be taught once every year not in the classrooms of the School but in the colleges, faculties, museums and galleries of the city. The third is the appointment of Oxford Fellows, graduate or postgraduate students to work part-time alongside our teachers, sharing their expertise and their passion for their subjects. The first of those new appointments will be made for September, and we’re aiming to run our first Oxford Lectures and Oxford Days later this academic year. You’ve talked about aiming for excellence in every aspect of the School – how is this manifested in plans for the next few years? Excellence is about buildings and facilities, but it is also about the soft structures that make a school great. For the first, we are in the process of finalising a ten-year development plan for the estate, identifying where we need to create new facilities or expand our existing buildings. The obvious priority there is our facilities for girls’ sport,

Julie Curtis, Professor of Russian Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford, lectures the Fifth Form on Gogol’s The Government Inspector

‘Children need to be happy’ was a point you made in your interview for Teddies TV – can you say something about pastoral care at the School and how you are looking to continue to develop this fundamental aspect of school life? Even before I applied to be the 14 th Warden, I knew that Teddies had a great reputation for the warmth and friendliness of the community, and that reputation really is deserved. It doesn’t happen by itself though – it happens because the pupils here feel so well supported by the school and by their parents, working together. We haven’t found any secrets to happiness and we never will, because it is so personal. But there’s no doubt in my mind that happiness comes from a feeling of belonging, from knowing that others are looking out for you, from being on top of events rather than just responding to them, and from a feeling of moving forward in your life. The pastoral structures at Teddies mean that pupils can see the support available to them, especially with the House teams so visible all the time and with more than two thirds of our teachers living onsite. We’re aiming to increase that number to 80% over the next five years and eventually to be able to accommodate all our teaching staff, so that our pastoral care can be properly universal. Our work on developing the academic structures for pupils is important here too. We are working on plans to change the

shape of the school day in September, to protect time for prep in the evenings so that all pupils can keep on top of their work without feeling that it is taking them away from all the other opportunities available to them. We are also making two new appointments for September. Virginia Macgregor will be our first Director of Wellbeing, and she will take our programme for Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education and expand it to become a wellbeing curriculum spanning all areas of school life. We are also in the process of appointing for the first time a School Psychologist, who will manage our counselling provision and who will provide a further layer of expert help for pupils when – as inevitably happens for all of us from time to time – things are not going so well. You’ve said that service is very important to the School’s ethos – what does this mean in practice? Service is an attitude of mind, putting others before ourselves, and like everything else it can be learnt at school. And like everything that we learn at school, it has benefits for us too. Practically, service can happen in two ways, the first inside the school and the second outside it. At Teddies, it is about pupils doing things for each other – whether that is helping your HM to supervise the corridors at bedtime,