Presentation Day Speech July 2016 Andrew Hampton said: It has been another great year for the school. Numbers on Roll currently stand as high as they have been in ten years. More numbers bring fuller coffers and the happy announcement that we are soon to break ground on a major building project. The hold up – and it took a very long time – was in planning. While planning is now granted, we need to acknowledge the hard and expert work done by the school’s architect – Steve Kearney – because we have permission to build a whopping great square box on green belt land. We never took planning permission for granted but we are now in a strong position to make the most of this hard-won decision. I am very excited about the design for the new Sports Hall building and expect it to be a landmark in the town. I like to think that one of the reasons we were able to gain planning permission was because of the school’s track record within the community over the last few years. As you know from previous speeches I have made, our relationship with the Local Authority is excellent, and we are thoroughly embedded in the thinking of officers working across the whole range of local services. In our application, we were also able to point to our emerging relationships with local schools and clubs. For instance this year we have invited pupils from Stambridge School and Baron’s Court School to use our facilities and be taught by our teachers. We have sponsored the Cadets weeks at both Thorpe Bay Yacht Club and the Essex Yacht Club. We have continued to host the Southend Schools Sports partnership events in both football and rounders and, along with hiring our theatre to local drama groups, we have seen several thousand young people cross the threshold to visit the school this year. Add to this the great success this year of Grandparent day, organised and run by the new management of Friends of Thorpe Hall (FROTH) and no one could argue that Thorpe Hall any longer hides its light. We intend that the Sports Hall will be another boost to this community engagement along with the appointment of our new Development Officer, Cheryl Bertschi. She will continue to oversee the Nursery but will also develop our alumni relations, oversee facilities bookings and build our outreach programme with local schools and clubs. Her post is an ambitious step forward for the school and represents a determination to be a genuine community partner, a school whose commitment to local engagement we can all be proud of. So what else is new for 2016? Let me start with schemes that have continued to evolve and deliver success. Most parents, though not all, will be aware of the Girls on Board Scheme. This scheme is a way of empowering girls to find ways to resolve their friendships issues. This year saw the scheme delivered to pupils as young as Year 3. Working on friendship issues with 8-year-olds is not straightforward, and much wisdom was gained back in the autumn helping girls to resolve conflict. I am aware that whilst there are very few girls in the school over the age of 8 who are not acutely aware of the scheme, the same cannot be said of parents, and it is my intention in this next year to produce a number of short videos for parents which describe this and other core aspects that relate to teaching and learning at Thorpe Hall. There are three schemes in particular which I wish to make parents much more aware of, and they are different, effective and innovative. Girls in Board is the most evolved and recently reached the gratifying point where I shall be taking the scheme to other schools. The Arts Ed School in Battersea and Shrewsbury School have both invited me to go and talk to their girls and coach their teachers how to deliver the scheme. As you might anticipate, I have long been developing an equivalent for boys and Boys on Board was indeed launched in the Upper School this term. The scheme has elements that are focused on friendship but more importantly the problem of engagement. We want boys to jump in with both feet every day in every lesson and not fall foul of that ghastly grunting culture that means that doing well is not cool, that only losers engage whole-heartedly, and that sport is the only curriculum subject they are prepared, reluctantly to get out of bed for. This kind of micro-culture spreads and takes hold via the learning attitudes adopted by the top dogs within a year group and so that is where the Boys on Board scheme starts.
We look at hierarchies and look at the responsibilities carried by those who rise to the top. We also look at banter and the corrosive effect it can have on the ability for individuals to flourish. We look at lifestyle choices, and I audited amongst the boys in Years 7 through 10 just how much time they spent playing video games. The results were shocking, to be frank. Responses ranged from zero hours a week to over 30 hours a week. Not one boy who report over 20 hours a week seemed to think that was a problem. I turned to the girls in the room and asked how they felt about the fact that potential future life partners in their generation would have spent longer by far playing shoot ‘em up games than any other single activity except sleeping. We know from published statistics that boys are under-performing compared to girls in every aspect of education at every age group. During their spare time, girls communicate, mostly through the spoken word at school and then via FaceTime or social media at home. The boys’ equivalent is to spend their school break times playing football and their spare time at home playing video games. Thus through adolescence girls get steadily better at communicating, and boys get steadily better a kicking a ball and pretending to shoot aliens. At the same time, I audited parental regulation, and virtually no boys reported that their gaming habit was seriously regulated or limited by parents. Typically they said that parents rightly demanded that the game be switched off quickly when the boy was called and also that the boy would readily engage with alternative activities when asked to. But the default was to revert to the gaming console, and I suspect that many parents here do not actually fully understand the number of hours a week their son spends gaming. This is something that I think we need to address as a community, and I shall be putting forward my own ideas and guidance next term as we launch Boys on Board to families. It will be only guidance of course, but in everything I have read this year about what is holding boys back so much at the moment points at the need for more robust and intrusive parenting. The third scheme I shall be communicating with home about is called Learning 1-2-3 . The Learning 1- 2-3 scheme is a simple, universal deconstruction of knowledge and knowledge acquisition. It states that knowledge is either facts, processes - which are facts joined together and understood - or skills - which can be either mental or physical skills. In turn, learning is achieved through revisiting, using your knowledge and practice. This six-point programme was launched with pupils in the Upper School in February, and I will be looking to embed this thinking into the teaching style of every lesson next year. I am pleased with the details of the model so far and I have had numerous conversations with educators here and elsewhere and no one has yet been able to break the model or demonstrate that there are examples of knowledge and learning that fall outside its parameters – at least not up to Key stage 4. You might argue that if such a model of knowledge and learning were so straightforward then it would long have lain at the heart of education throughout the world. Well, I feel that firstly educators have allowed both the nature and acquisition of knowledge to be become the object of endless debate and therefore have obscured some basic and simple truths. Secondly, I believe that such schemes probably have existed in other schools but have failed because they have not been universally adopted by teachers. This I think is the key. We have always known that getting people to use knowledge gained from one area of the curriculum and apply it in another area is very difficult. Pupils can't remember their basic Maths skills when doing Science or how to spell when outside the English classroom. By creating comprehensive and simple-to-understand ways of thinking about knowledge and learning we create a platform where the transfer of knowledge is effortless and obvious. The Learning 1-2-3, like the Boys on Board and the Girls on Board , is about creating a common language and platform for teachers and learners so that communication is powerful and effective. All three schemes seek to enhance learning and outcomes for pupils and I am very excited at the prospect of pulling all these threads together next year and watch learning and indeed results improve. The Learning 1-2-3 scheme is similar in its execution to the highly successful Read Write Inc scheme that has been adopted by the Lower School for learners up until the age they become secure free readers. Read Write Inc is not unique to Thorpe Hall, far from it. This is a commercially produced
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