Suffice to say, ‘engagement’ – whether online or in real life – is an area upon which we want to focus in order better to promote the school and an understanding of our ethos, and the outstanding experience our boys get. We want to share with others the character, energy and joy that the boys bring to their daily life, and of course the excellence, dedication and unstinting hard work of the wonderful staff – in all areas of the school. Because the truth is, social media is now very often the first point of connection someone outside the school community might have with us.  

One of the areas upon which I find myself most frequently engaged in discussion by prospective parents is the academic ethos of the school. I have spoken at many parent meetings, and beyond, about the way in which academic learning and life preparation are best served by an ethos that actively enriches beyond a curriculum that happens to be the focus of summative assessment in Year 8. We value, pursue and advise building cultural capital, general knowledge and a love of ‘knowing stuff’ for its own sake because it is rooted deep in the human experience, because it brings joy, improves confidence and self-esteem, and it expedites and better secures the learning that goes on in the classroom. Newly acquired knowledge sticks better when cross-referenced with previously existing knowledge.  

And between these two – our recent social media posts and our academic ethos – there lies, nestled, a growing statistic that tells its own tale. By far and away our most viewed and shared post - standing at 183k views at time of writing – essentially says, ‘Exams are important, but there’s a whole load they don’t show about who I am, what I love to do and what I’m great at.’ Why has this resonated so much? Simply because it’s true. We all know it. And it gives us release, and it gives us perspective. And it gives us a needed shot in the arm that we are individuals of wonder and enormous potential, regardless of exam results.  

I’ve lost count of the times parents have said to me over the years something akin to: ‘The most successful people I know didn’t do very well at school by standard academic measures.’ And why is this so often true? Because – as I heard well put a few months ago – it’s not the destination, it’s not even the journey, it’s who we become along the journey that counts most. If a journey shapes and teaches us to meet challenge and adversity, and to come out the other side with the confidence that those periods of challenge need not define either us or our future potential, fantastic. 

However, nuance is everything. Last week I wrote about the dangers of polarity, of presenting things as a zero-sum affair when this is simply just not the case. The fact that all of the above is true does not mean exams don’t have their place, or that the sense of pressure they can create is entirely unhelpful, or that it isn’t important to do one’s best. There is a symbiotic relationship between preparing for and managing exams and examined pieces of work and simultaneously understanding that the results do not define your worth as a person. We send a number of boys on to the most academically competitive schools in the country. (As Mr Power mentioned at a meeting yesterday, some of the French in the past Eton King’s Scholarship paper he used last week wouldn’t have been out of place at university.) This is not a position in which you can place them if you are not going to give every focus to supporting a boy’s chances of doing their best. 

And so it is, that at this time each year, all Year 8 teachers gather for review meetings of the recent internal exams, poring over and discussing boys’ results with utmost care and attention. We work to understand learning points, rubric errors, surprises, what preparation advice is needed next time, whether there were external factors to take into consideration… and we do this to help the boys perform to their best and to better build the skills of preparing, noting, revising that will help them in all manner of areas, not just exams.  

Does this make us overly-exam-focused? An academic hot house? Driven solely by results? If you’ve been reading as far as this sentence, I hope you can see both the rhetorical nature of those questions and the clear ‘unspoken’ answer: that we simply care about giving the boys every chance of doing their best – whatever that may be in. That we achieve results like last year where five Year 8s got on to the Election role at Winchester College is a by-product, albeit a very happy one indeed. 

Tim Butcher
Headmaster