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Our View of St Edward’s School
St Edward’s, Oxford is on fire – academic ambition is at an all-time high yet none of the school’s characteristic warmth and roundedness has been sacrificed in the pursuit. And it’s no flash in the pan – our most recent visit proved that energy and momentum remain palpably high, fuelled by a passionate and experienced warden who believes that ‘if it makes a child’s life better, then we should do it now’.
Pupils want to come here, staff want to teach here, and they are certainly rattling the cages of the academic elite.
Where is St Edward’s School?
St Edward’s School (known as Teddies) is one of the sector’s very best environmental juxtapositions, with a staggering 100 acres of green and pleasant land just moments from the urban Summertown High Street and only a mile from Oxford City Centre. It takes under 10 minutes to reach two train stations that connect with London and Birmingham within an hour. The M40 and M4 are quickly accessible, and Heathrow is less than an hour’s drive away.
The 100-acre site is divided into ‘Quad side’, where most of the action takes place, and ‘Field side’ where the sports centre, fields, pitches and further boarding are located. As this is technically an urban school, there’s no grand entrance and parking is tight, but around the gatehouse corner you’ll find fine Victorian red-brick buildings surrounding Oxford’s second-largest quad (dug up for air raid shelters during the Second World War).
Traditional buildings sit side by side with stunning architectural masterpieces such as the Christie Centre – an extraordinary new space complete with a magnificent library,
sixth form social area and a reading room that aesthetically echoes Oxford’s colleges – and the Olivier Hall, a magnificent oval-shaped performance and assembly space with room for the whole school to gather together. Both come with all the sustainability credentials you would expect, given the schools ‘facilities for sustainable excellence’ mantra.
Headmaster
Alastair Chirnside, the 14th warden of St Edward’s Oxford (or Teddies), took up the post in 2021, arriving from Harrow and with stints at Eton and as a City fund manager under his belt. He combines professional amiability with a steely ambition that would reassure parents who want both pastoral warmth and scholarly rigour. With two meticulous, passionate and experienced sub-wardens at his side, he is ‘all over it’ from strategic blue-sky thinking to the nuts and bolts of the student curriculum.
Mr Chirnside’s ambition for ‘more visibility’ when he first arrived is certainly bearing fruit, but what’s impressive is that the increased focus on strengthening and celebrating their academic credentials has not lessened his quest for the broad range of skills needed to ‘develop fledgling learners into
undergraduates’.
He has instigated a project interviewing leavers five and 10 years later in order to establish where Teddies has helped them in getting to where they are, or to highlight areas where the school could have done more to prepare them. It’s evidence of his understanding that the here and now is only one part of the impact a school can have, and he must undoubtedly take pride in reading pupil reflections such as ‘as I leave Teddies, I am taking away a version of myself that I am proud of and happy to be’. St Edward's Oxford works hard to help pupils take responsibility for their own learning, focusing on their own personal effort rather than any one predetermined standard and giving them the motivation to do it. ‘We don’t want pupils to think that they could have tried harder’. Ultimately, he says, ‘the most important skill is emotional intelligence as life will always be about people’.
St Edward’s School admissions process
Teddies is an increasingly popular choice, with around six times the number of applicants for 145 places in Year 9 (aka ‘Shell’). The admissions department have seen a notable surge in enquiries since Mr Chirnside took the reins, especially from those interested in academic prowess. But they have no plans to become an academic hothouse and holding on to ’everything that makes us special’ is front and centre.
Entrance to all year groups (most commonly at Year 9 with further additions in Year 10 and the sixth form) is via an academic entrance exam. Pupils who are thought to be suited to the demands of the curriculum will be invited for an
interview during the second stage. The minimum entry requirement for sixth form is a 7 or above in subjects they hope to study at A-level or at higher level in the
IB (grade 8 for maths or the sciences).
There are more than 40 nationalities here from all corners of the globe, but careful integration is key – whether that’s placement of overseas
boarders across the houses or ensuring that prep-school cohorts are dispersed.
Academics and destinations
There’s a real culture of hard work and achievement here, and results are going from strength to strength with the last two years being the best ever. Nearly a quarter of the 2024 A-level cohort achieved three A grades or higher, and 80 per cent were graded A*-B. IB students did superbly with one in eight achieving 38 points or better (the level set for admission to Oxford), and nearly two-thirds of GCSE level exams were graded 9-7 - the highest in the school’s history. Excitingly, recent investments in super curricular activities and the calibre of students coming in, all point to a record smashing future. Choice is also a big gun in this armoury, with younger pupils selecting their subjects from a broad array of GCSEs and the school’s own ‘Pathways and Perspectives’, the latter being formally accredited qualifications specifically created to deliver the softer skills, such as collaboration, that pupils can’t achieve through narrow channels. These specially designed courses were five years in development and range from sports science to entrepreneurship.
Sixth-formers too have the choice of A-level or IB, with the balance between the two qualifications varying from year to year but tending to be roughly equal.
One of the key aims of the new Christie Centre is to encourage and foster university-style learning, and we were impressed by the wealth of private and independent study spaces for pupils to pick from (the sixth form reading room looks and feels more like a university library). There’s a small, well-integrated team of learning support staff available to provide extra help to pupils who need it, but empowering students to govern their own learning is as important as the learning itself and a far more long-lasting skill. St Edward's School is taking this approach even further in developing a Teddies ‘curriculum map’, which plots the growth needed from fresh-faced Year 9 to capable self-motivated undergraduate and mapping exactly when, where and how children will acquire every skill they need.
Our pupil guides described Teddies as ’an active atmosphere – we are interactive in lessons, and we have a say in how we want to learn and our teachers help to deliver that’. And they don’t do things by halves – the recent ‘Teddies in Flight’ week included talks from a Concorde pilot and a NASA astronaut, an exhibition of pupil work on helio-physics and a 2-day loan of a British Airways flight simulator offering 150 brave students the opportunity to land a commercial plane at an international airport.
Sixth-formers are well prepared for the jump to higher education, with a dedicated
careers counsellor with whom they meet termly to track progress and discuss options. A newly appointed head of careers and employability is overseeing a whole-school careers festival including over 80 visiting speakers and the creation of a hugely valuable ‘Teddies Business Directory’ made up of alumni, parents and friends of the school who are all willing to support pupils with careers advice and work placements. Leavers go on to a range of universities, mostly Russell Groups, with Exeter, Edinburgh, London and Bristol always popular. A handful gain Oxbridge places, go abroad or secure places at art, music and drama schools, and US Universities grow in popularity with over 15 per cent of last year’s leavers applying to at least one US institution (ably assisted by a member of staff dedicated to US applications and available seven days a week.)
Co-curricular at St Edward’s School
As one of the top three rowing schools in the UK and with the Thames close at hand, coaching and facilities are at international level with some of this year’s cohort doing GB trials. Cricket is also particularly strong – the minimalist pavilion by John Pawson is marvellous – and recent successes have enhanced its reputation as one of the top schools nationally. But there’s something for everyone, and those who aren’t chasing places on the rugby or hockey A teams can find their niche in anything from athletics and sailing to squash or golf. Dance should also get some limelight here with around a quarter of the whole school taking dance as a lesson or hobby – and 20 per cent of those are boys. In a further gilding of the lily, plans are afoot to build a stunning community sports facility built around an indoor hockey pitch and with floodlit pitches and an athletics track providing yet more top of the range facilities for the benefit of Teddies students and the school children of the wider community - we’ll keep you posted.
Strong art, design, drama and music have long been a feature of St Edward's School (Laurence Olivier was a pupil, and more recently, actors Florence Pugh and Emilia Clarke) and stellar facilities help keep standards high. A superb new music centre was completed in 2017, across the road from the North Wall Arts Centre, a RIBA award-winning 200-seater theatre and exhibition space used by the school and open to the public. Teddies’ plays and musicals give a few West End shows a run for their money and there’s always at least one St Edward’s creation at the Edinburgh Fringe.
The school's music department not only benefits from an energetic and passionate leader, it has a close relationship with the music community in Oxford and has collaborated with the English Chamber Orchestra (among others) while the in-house ‘Friday at Five’ concerts are a popular and well-attended regular feature. There’s a fantastic jewellery-design workshop and the design and technology space is a maze of machinery, with dynamic, on-the-ball staff.
St Edward's School’s longstanding ties with the army manifest in a thriving CCF from Year 10. Those opting out can select a life-skills course: think finance, mindfulness, research and presentation skills (genuinely useful stuff). Adding to this rich mosaic of learning are a cluster of mostly student-run clubs and societies, from beekeeping and debating to journalism and psychology.
Boarding at St Edward’s School
Very firmly a boarding school, with 84 per cent of pupils living in, though you’d never know who’s day or not. Children are allowed to sign out on Saturday after lessons and matches, but typically around 40 per cent of the pupils stay in for the weekend as there’s a massive amount on – from informal barbecues to cinema trips and jaunts into the centre of Oxford, all previewed in the termly Weekends at Teddies booklet.
There are 13 houses – five for girls, four for boys and four
co-ed (an increasingly popular choice). In a delightfully inclusive spirit, day pupils, even if they live minutes away, are allocated a space in each house to stash their belongings or have a well-deserved break: they don’t leave until either 6.30pm or 9pm, after clubs, activities, supper and homework. All meals are taken in the main school dining room, but pupils regularly pop back to their house for rounds of toast and catch-ups at break. The newer houses are very impressive (Jubilee poses as a feature from Architectural Digest) – but there's a rolling programme of refurbishment underway on some of the older ones too.
An expanded bus service - one from South Kensington via Beaconsfield and one from Dulwich via Putney and Maidenhead - brings pupils back from London every Sunday evening and is available to transport pupils back on exeat and leave weekends.
St Edward’s School community
St Edward's Oxford has long seen community partnership as important, but we were properly impressed by the ‘Teddies Collaborates’ programme, which sees 191 pupils going out into the community once a week to help out. There’s a fleet of bikes on hand to get them to where they need to be, and pupils choose partners to whom their skill sets will be most valuable - from support in a local school for children with social, emotional or mental health difficulties to dancing and playing games with residents of a nearby care home or volunteering at the food bank. Building on the success of Teddies Collaborates, the school has launched a ‘Teddies Up’ initiative, which invites over 40 Year 6 pupils from local schools to attend on Saturday mornings for classes focusing on oracy and presentation skills, modern languages and economics. There’s no performative philanthropy here - it’s a long term, meaningful commitment that greatly benefits all parties and the warden firmly believes that ‘parents want a school where children learn to play their part – it’s right at every level, ethically, socially and politically’.
There’s a very solid school community too – pupils quite clearly look out for each other, and some are trained up as ‘peer listeners’, receiving training from the Samaritans. A newly appointed deputy head, welfare unites all the strands of pastoral care (including the school’s onsite psychologist, school counsellor and GP) and uses feedback from all layers of pastoral support to track trends for individuals and cohorts in order to target pro-active pastoral initiatives in the most effective manner.
It’s worthy of note that St Edward's School operates a very robust mobile phone policy throughout the school. A decision made in the very best interests of pupils and which has already seen participation in choirs and groups increasing, the need for greater numbers of newspapers and periodicals around the school and a hearty restoration of singing on the match bus. Hats off to them – it’s a thoroughly researched yet bold move, accepted by pupils and universally appreciated by parents who fear the long-term damage of over exposure to devices and social media.
And finally...
Challenge and empowerment are words that come up a lot here and students are encouraged to seize the day whether that’s in the classroom or elsewhere. Teddies is a holistic powerhouse striving to open even more doors for its pupils by pushing the boundaries academically whilst also recognising and rewarding co-curricular skills with their flourishing St Edward’s awards. This school is organised, innovative, enthusiastic, forward-thinking and brave enough to make decisions and investments today that will shape the principled global citizens and leaders of tomorrow.