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It’s safe to say that this formerly unsung hero has found its voice. St Edward’s, Oxford is on fire – academic ambitions are at an all-time high, but none of the school’s characteristic warmth and roundedness has been sacrificed in the pursuit.
Pupils want to come here; staff want to teach here, and they are certainly rattling the cages of the academic elite.
Where?
St Edward’s (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.
Head
Alastair Chirnside, the 14th warden of St Edward’s, 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 the meticulous David Flower as his academic right-hand man, 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. Similarly, Mr Chirnside acknowledges that exams are important to open up opportunities, but how can the school help pupils develop the skills needed to maximise on those? ‘What kind of person do pupils become and what part did the school play in shaping that – do they read books, do they stand by their friends, do they make tough decisions, are they always kind?’ Teddies 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’.
Admissions
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. Prospective pupils sit the ISEB Pre-Test in Year 6, with Common Entrance results in Year 8 taken into further consideration. Some 65 per cent of places are awarded in Year 6, a further 25 per cent in Year 7 and the remaining 10 per cent in Year 8. The minimum entry requirement for sixth form is six GCSEs or equivalent at grade 9-6. Pupils should gain 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 - 83 per cent of last year's A-levels were graded A*-B, IB students bagged average scores of 35 and nearly two-thirds of GCSE level exams were graded 9-7 which is the highest in the school’s history. 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 and global society.
Sixth-formers too have the choice of A-level or IB, with the IB growing in popularity from 30 per cent around 5 years ago to 50 per cent of the current cohort.
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. Pupils are taught to understand how they learn, and which revision techniques fit best with each style. The 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’. There is an ‘overwhelming amount of support’ but pupils definitely felt that the school firmly remained an ‘all-rounder’.
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. 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.
Co-curricular
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 (there’s a reservoir nearby) 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.
Strong art, design, drama and music have long been a feature of Teddies (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.
Teddies’ longstanding ties with the army manifest in compulsory CCF in Year 10. Those opting out after this year 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
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 just under half 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, five for boys and three co-ed (an increasingly popular choice) – Apsley recently started welcoming girls to become the newest co-ed option. 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.
Two school-run coach services bring pupils back from London - one from South Kensington via Beaconsfield and one from Dulwich via Putney and Maidenhead, every Sunday evening, and is available to transport pupils back on exeat and leave weekends.
School community
Teddies has long since seen community partnership as important, but we were properly impressed by the newly launched and formalised ‘Teddies Collaborates’ programme, which requires every single lower-sixth pupil to volunteer with a local partner every week. 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 helping out at the food bank. It’s a long term, meaningful commitment that greatly benefits all parties, but the warden notes that beyond the practical support pupils offer from week to week, the programme provides a longer-term public advantage in helping children to have a completely open mindset and truly understand their communities in order to use their (fortunate) positions to maximum benefit both here and beyond.
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.
And finally...
Challenge and empowerment are words that come up a lot here and children 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. But they are also brave enough to invest a great deal today in delivering the skills and values needed to shape the principled citizens and leaders of tomorrow.