St Edward's 150 Years - by Nicola Hunter

St Edward’s: 150 Years

A practical EPQ project by Joe Withers Green (A, 2005–10). It was designed to model the ‘Detonator’ ride at Thorpe Park, measuring the acceleration and velocity of his model (with ‘passengers’) and comparingitwithpublishedtechnical data on the real thing.

IB Group 4 Project Presentations in the Life Sciences Building attended by pupils and teachers, 2013.

by a handful of academics in Oxford back in the early 1960s. Their desire to foster and reward an all-round education that was not just academic but also extra-curricular, and to develop the ‘whole person’, remains a central premise of the diploma programme and proved a decisive factor in St Edward’s applying to become an IB school. Much work was done, first by James Cope, to ensure the School was able to gain authorisation from the IB and was ready to teach the first pupils when they started courses in September 2008. For the past four years I have led the development and growth of the School’s IB programme and Alastair Summers has now taken over responsibility for its management and coordination. Most of the first cohort, who sat their IB exams in May 2010, will have just completed their finals, and already there are OSEs who did IB at almost every Russell Group university as well as at several prestigious institutions overseas. The academic headlines have been impressive, with more than a third of the School’s IB pupils having achieved at least 38 points (out of a maximum of 45), the starting point for Oxbridge offers. Katie Battcock remains the only OSE so far to have achieved the perfect score of 45 points, although several others have come very close. This was an exceptional achievement and one which placed Katie in the top 0.5 per cent of IB students globally. Overall the School’s results have meant that St Edward’s is in the premier league of IB schools in the UK and amongst the top few co-educational schools. Dr Andrew Davis and Dr Garrett Nagle have been pioneers of Environmental Systems and Societies, a new course within the Diploma Programme, for which they have produced several resources and textbooks. The School’s Head of Modern Languages, Marie-Laure Delvallée, is examiner and author for several French textbooks. Perhaps the most exciting development, however, has been the recent publication of a Geography Revision guide co-written by Ben Tavener, a current pupil, who has several more in production.

Under the umbrella of CAS (Creativity, Action and Service) several IB pupils have been heavily involved in the School’s Duke of Edinburgh and Peer Listening programmes, and many others have been responsible for various successful charitable initiatives. Originally under the guidance of Kirsty Jones and, more recently, Liz Boast, dozens of IB pupils have raised tens of thousands of pounds, at a House or School level, for a number of good causes. In this 150th year, when the School’s IB programme is celebrating its fifth anniversary, it is perhaps fitting that by September more than 150 pupils will have opted to study for the Diploma Programme and more than a third of the incoming Lower Sixth will be IB pupils, the highest proportion yet for any year group. The future of the IB at Teddies certainly looks bright. Matt Parker IB Coordinator 2008–13 ENGLISH In spite of the use of data projectors, e-readers, and laptops, it is still fair to say that English lessons remain unchanged in terms of their essential characteristics: classes read and talk about what they have read, points of grammar are addressed where necessary, and essays on various topics are written and

A display in the English Department.

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