Chronicle Summer 2023

12 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

‘A bucketful of interesting, varied opportunities which pupils actually enjoy’ THE GOOD SCHOOLS GUIDE 2023

January to December. That way, they are taking pupils from the start of their thinking about university in the Lower Sixth to the submission of their applications or their interviews in December. During that time, they are doing one-to-one classes with pupils who need extra help, giving tutorials to small groups of the most talented and interested pupils, talking regularly with teachers about their own research and about what they are seeing at university. And don’t forget that these postgraduate students do a lot of the teaching for undergraduates, and a lot of the admissions interviewing too – they can give us a real insight into what’s happening at Oxford and other universities. What do you say to people who feel that Teddies is becoming ‘too academic’? Academic means connected with studying and thinking, so I don’t think you can have

a school which is “too academic”. Every school wants to be more academic – in that teachers want the best possible outcomes for their pupils, and we can always make improvements in teaching and learning. That’s also what parents and pupils want – in last year’s survey, 90% of parents said that high academic achievement was the most important experience for their children at school and most thought that we should be doing more in that area. So we are! It’s also what pupils want – in their survey this summer, they told us that they wanted us to set more academic targets. We’re going to do that too. People usually make that point when they are talking about admissions, but I think they’re confusing the huge increase in demand for places – which has more than doubled in the last three years – with a change in what we’re looking for when we

make our decisions. We haven’t changed the height of the bar, there are just more people clearing it and sadly we don’t have enough places for all of them. The last thing to say is that a school which is too academic would be a school in which academic work crowded out everything else or in which pupils’ mental health was suffering because they were too worried about their grades. There hasn’t been a sense of panic or anxiety over exams this summer, and that’s because pupils have worked hard and because they feel well prepared. We had record-breaking results last August with outstanding value added through our teaching, but pupils achieved those results in the same year in which they put on Sweeney Todd , performed in three brilliant Dance Shows, beat Eton and Downe House at cricket, put on spectacular exhibitions in The North Wall and the Art Department, and simply had a huge amount

Pupils in Apsley enjoying Time to Read