Choosing the right path for the Sixth Form

In our latest blog, Head of Sixth Form, James Ralphs gives us his top tips for identifying which academic route is right for you...

The Sixth Form is a wonderful part of school life. It is a chance to widen your horizons from both an academic and co-curricular perspective. Even before you step through the threshold of the lower sixth, you are asked to select what you are going to study.

So, where do you start?

A levels, IBDP or IBCP?

At Bryanston we offer three different academic routes for the Sixth Form: A level, the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) and the International Baccalaureate Career-related Programme (IBCP).

	A level	IBDP	IBCP
No. of subjects	Minimum of 3	6 (3 at higher level and 3 at standard level)	Cambridge Technical and 2 Diploma subjects

For some pupils, the idea of being able to study a broad range of subjects through the IB is an exciting one. For others, having to learn English, Maths and a language, even at standard level, is a non-starter and therefore A levels would be the appropriate path to take. Although there is overlap between the subjects offered at IB and A level, the course content can vary considerably. Therefore, a careful consideration of each subject and programme is essential. Talk to your current teachers and make the most of the information available to you. Bryanston pupils attend a Sixth Form choices fair in the spring term of Year 11 as well as having access to the Sixth Form choices guide, which gives a detailed breakdown of each subject.

What are your strengths?

Although not a perfect science, performance at GCSE does have a correlation with progress made in the Sixth Form. Choosing subjects in which you have a particular strength would be wise. At Bryanston, all heads of department will be looking for a 6 or higher at GCSE in order to access the A level or IB higher level subject content. The step up in workload, per subject, is considerable from GCSE to Sixth Form. Having a particular interest in your choices will make the work outside the classroom a lot easier. It is important that you have a desire for deeper learning, and a willingness to read around each of your chosen subjects in order to give yourself the best opportunity to succeed. Are you somebody who would benefit from less weighting on exams? Choosing a subject or programme with coursework would spread deadlines throughout the year.

What is your next step?

What you choose can have an impact on your options after school. One of the ultimate goals for studying in the Sixth Form is to qualify for entry into whichever route you would like to go down next. If this is university, then you will want to choose subjects which give you the best opportunity of achieving top grades. Some degrees will have specific pre-requisite subjects. For example, studying Medicine usually requires both Chemistry and Biology (at higher level for IB) and the majority of the top Economics degrees require Mathematics. If you don’t have a particular degree or career in mind, pick subjects which complement each other and play to your academic strengths.

The decision of what to study in the Sixth Form shouldn’t be taken lightly. Discuss the advice above with your tutor throughout the rest of the autumn and spring terms. Speak to older pupils about their courses but ultimately ensure that the choices you make are right for you.

What you learn in Mathematics classes...

Bryanston's Head of Mathematics, Alex Hartley, explains why Maths is more relevant outside the classroom than you might think.

As interesting and enjoyable as it is to use a pair of compasses to construct the perpendicular bisector of a straight line, I do confess that pupils have asked me when exactly they will use this skill in real life. Further, I will even concede that my usual response – that it will form part of their iGCSE examinations – is, in the language of youngsters today, a bit lame. So, in this post I will attempt to explain more generally what our pupils learn through studying Mathematics, and whether or not there is more to it than just getting to the right answer.

With a new class, my first lesson of the academic year in September might well involve what I call the Handshakes Investigation. Working in groups, we establish, by getting out of our seats and getting involved, how many handshakes might take place when, say, three, or four, or another number of people meet for the first time. Building up a table of results for various numbers of people, we might seek to explain the patterns that are evident, refining our thoughts to form an algebraic equation and using this to test and predict future results. There’s a lot in there; elements of teamwork, of identifying patterns in numbers, and predicting and testing future results. At a more advanced level, pupils are generalising a particular rule and hence using algebra to construct a simple yet elegant and powerful formula that can be used not just in the cases already discussed, but many more besides. This investigation is a journey for each pupil and there’s a lot more to it than simply getting to the right answer. It also makes for a richer experience than simply working through problems from a textbook, although there is, of course, a time and a place for that and practice does indeed make perfect. Looking towards a real-life application, it is analogous to the problem of asking how many matches take place in a league in which a certain number of teams all play each other*.

Change in the world of mathematics teaching is approaching, with both the British curriculum and the IB offering new courses within the next few years. Following the Chancellor’s encouragement in his Autumn Statement (2017), we’ve offered Core Maths as an accessible course in the sixth form. Core Maths is entirely based around the practical applications of maths – mainly statistical and financial – that our pupils are likely to need both in their personal and professional lives, regardless of the career choices they make. We’re optimistic that our first cohort of pupils, who are just completing A3 (Year 12), will earn a good set of grades which will contribute to their overall accumulation of UCAS points and may enhance their choices at university. The IB curriculum will soon change too, and mathematics will be split into two subjects; Maths Analysis (which will contain a great deal of algebra and calculus, in common with A level courses), and Maths Applications (which will focus upon the uses of maths in real-life).

What would I do differently, if it were up to me to design the curriculum? Three things. First of all, I’d make iGCSE Mathematics, and particularly the foundation tier, focus more upon the applications of mathematics to real life. More questions about, for example, personal finance and perhaps we’d cope without a pair of compasses. Secondly, I’d insist that everybody studied mathematics at some level in the sixth form (just like in the IB) and finally, I’d set more questions that drew in a range of different skills, because that would encourage pupils to better understand the rich connections between each area of mathematics that they study.

So, there’s a lot to enjoy and savour in mathematics lessons; there is of course a range of skills and techniques which do need to be explicitly taught and practised to ensure fluency. But solving problems, talking things through, and creating and testing ideas is all in there too – and this is true for all pupils, no matter what their prior attainment or ability in Mathematics.



* h = ½ x n x (n-1)  is the formula, where h is the number of handshakes, and n the number of people involved. Relating this to sports fixtures, 20 Premier League teams could play each other in ½ of 20 x 19 = 190 matches, but overall 380 matches are played each season because teams meet both home and away.

You can follow Bryanston Mathematics on Twitter here @BryanstonMaths.

School lingo

This week the Head, Sarah Thomas, demystifies the language of schools, including the word tutor, which has a particular resonance for Bryanston.

Schools are full of the most remarkable lingo. I’ve worked at a school where prefects were called praepostors (but were generally known as pollies); where lines (the sort you write as punishment for a minor offence) were called solaces; where some senior members of staff were known as Div Heads (you might imagine how one slip of a typing finger could turn that particular title into something much more of an insult). Of course, Bryanston has its own language too: Every day, we use terms such as hsm (pronounced, as one Good School Guide entry some years ago put it, to rhyme with bosom), correction periods (which to me conjures images of medieval torture implements), EMRs and breakers, to name but a few. Hsm, a rather wonderful piece of non-gender-specific language, thankfully all but eliminated one of my own favourite spellcheck-induced typos – housemattress, which computers tend to prefer to the rather unwieldy housemaster/mistress.

EMRs (Early Morning Reports, requiring pupils to report to a prefect early in the morning), breakers (a breaktime run) and the now defunct nooners (an afternoon run) refer to forms of punishment for minor misdemeanours and hark back to Bryanston’s early years. As a new foundation, keen to move on from some of the more questionable public-school traditions, Bryanston was, from very early on, a school that did not believe in corporal punishment, so perhaps we should not be surprised that there exists a canon of pure BrySpeak about the alternative ways of confronting errant behaviour.

As for correction periods, perhaps we should call them You-Won’t-Believe-Your-Luck periods. Rooted firmly in the language of the Dalton Plan and long modified over the decades into, in effect, the Bryanston system, these are the times pupils spend with their individual teachers, one to one, or perhaps in pairs, in the sixth form (and from B upwards in some subjects), which allow them to review last week’s work and build upon it, looking forward and planning improvements. It’s a wonderfully individual method: some pupils can use the correction periods to ensure everything covered thus far has been clearly understood; others can use them to push their work on into new, limitless areas. No one else need know which of the two it is.

And then, of course, there’s the tutor. A word commonly used in schools and universities, at Bryanston it has a unique resonance, which owes more to its Latin derivation: watcher, protector, defender, guardian. I’ve been at Bryanston now for 13 years and am clear that one of the jewels in the crown (and there are several) is our tutoring system.

All tutors at Bryanston are assigned to pupils by me. It is one of my most important tasks as Head. Of course, I can’t do it alone – I have the help of my senior team of Admissions Registrar, Director of Admissions, Deputy Head Academic, and Senior Tutor. I also have a range of information to inform my decisions, from my conversations with the pupils themselves before they arrive at Bryanston and from a series of references supplied by the pupils’ current school.

I know our tutors very well. No one can tutor at Bryanston unless they have taught here for a year and been trained during that first year by the senior tutors. A tutor is assigned to a pupil on the basis of compatibility and interest at 13, and at 16 on the basis of direction too (for example, a 16-year-old entrant might well know they want to study in the USA or become a doctor and I can choose a tutor accordingly). There is nothing accidental or arbitrary about who tutors whom. It is not done on the basis of which house the pupil happens to be in or which members of staff happen to be on that house team. It is done on the basis of the pupil.

A tutorial between tutor and tutorial pupil will always be a one-to-one situation. The basis of the relationship is an academic one, with a focus upon the chart (now electronic, ripe for its update in September, and part of the system in one form or another since the school’s earliest day). But no child conveniently drops into two halves, one academic the other pastoral. And so, no tutor only deals with the academic, but also discusses general pastoral concerns (which will be shared with the hsm as appropriate) as well as, crucially at Bryanston, the extra-curricular life of the pupil in this school full of amazing and diverse extra-curricular opportunities.

I have had two daughters through Bryanston and each of them flourished in no small thanks to their fine tutors, Neil Boulton (Bryanston legend par excellence) and Hannah Fearnley ( a woman of enormous warmth, wit and wisdom). I don’t think there’s another school that does this essential job of looking after pupils as well as we do and that’s because I think our system is the tip top of it all. I am convinced that, whilst I logically might have to concede that my girls might have done as well or better in some respects elsewhere, because they are, when all is said and done, two wonderful girls (I am biased!), they would, simply put, not have enjoyed their universities (and yes, they were multiple in each case) as they did without Bryanston’s tutorial system, nor gained the degrees they did (likewise multiple), nor found the directions they did, nor even the careers they have.

I rarely wear my heart so boldly on my sleeve, because my nature is towards the self-deprecatory but I am passionate about this. Some people have remarked that some of my colleagues, such as Edrys Barkham, are evangelical about our tutorial system. Well, perhaps that’s because, just for once, we know, absolutely know, that we are right.

Discovering potential

This week we welcome our Director of Admissions, Edrys Barkham, with her reflections on our introduction of the pre-test now that we have made our first set of offers. You can find out why we introduced the pre-test in a previous blog here.

We have just sent out our first ever pre-test offer letters for pupils entering Bryanston in September 2019. We collated the results at the end of last term, which happened to be during the Jewish Hanukah Festival of Light. At that time, I heard a timely ‘pause for thought’ on the radio on my way to school outlining the different approaches of the House of Shamai and House of Hillel for the lighting of the eight candles of Hanukah. The Shamai start with eight candles and decrease by one each day, whilst the Hillel start with one and work up to eight. Both approaches have their origin in the last century BCE and have their own philosophies. To be admitted to the House of Shamai pupils were judged and had to be considered worthy of learning the Torah. The House of Hillel, on the other hand, were prepared to admit all those who asked, as they saw the potential in everyone. It made me think carefully about whether we should take the judgemental and selective eight-to-one approach with the pre-test, or see the potential in all and look to understand how we can nurture it. I had this very much in mind as we analysed the results. Should we have a cut-off and exclude all those below, basing decisions on the ability of a child on one particular day, at one particular time, and judge them suitable or unsuitable, and keep a small group of children in limbo on the waiting list, hopeful but helpless, relying on the chance of a place becoming available?

We are, and always have been, a selective school, but more in terms of what we can do for a child rather than what a child can do for the school. We see potential in all the children who went through the pre-testing process last term and we will not be rejecting any of them purely as a result of the marks they achieved. The reports we have received from their schools tell us far more about a child’s potential.

Our focus now, therefore, is on the children who haven’t yet reached the point at which we feel comfortable making an offer. They are on our development list, so called because we really do want to see how they develop over the next months. They have the priority for interviews, so that we can get to know them individually and discover their wider interests and talents. The key for us is to discover whether we are the best educational environment for them. “Will they thrive at Bryanston?” is always our key admissions question. Whilst we have to be certain they will be able to achieve their academic potential within our (modified Dalton) educational approach and recognise that we won’t suit all children equally, we do also look for the talents that can be nurtured over their five years with us, in order to develop confident young people, aware of their strengths and ready to contribute to our wider society. If a child on the development list is not suited to our system, we will advise that it will be in their best interest to be at a school where they will flourish.

In this uncertain, increasingly populist world of the present, our aim continues to be to educate reflective young people who understand who they are, are comfortable in their own skin and recognise what they are capable of achieving. To deny them that possibility purely on the basis of one test result, when they are at an age at which they are just beginning to discover their individual strengths and talents, would seem to be a waste of potential. Our sincere hope is that all our young people will develop the confidence and creativity to shape positively the world in which they find themselves.

Independent learning

This week we welcome Bryanston's Deputy Head (Academic), Dr David James, with a blog on independent learning.

Bryanston has a long commitment to promoting independent learning: in every weekly assignment period, correction period, and subject room, this approach is visible, pushing our pupils to take ever greater responsibility for their own learning. Of course, that does not mean that the teacher removes him or herself from the process. Instead, an effective teacher knows when to give direct instruction, and when to provide the appropriate levels of support the pupil needs to go beyond what is prescribed in the National Curriculum.

But how is that balance struck? How does a teacher know when to intervene, and when to allow the pupil to try, sometimes fail, and learn to succeed? To some extent the answer is: we never know for sure, and there are challenges within every aspect of ‘independent learning’ that pupils, parents, teachers and policy makers have to be aware of before they start advocating it as some sort of panacea for every conceivable educational situation.

Independent learning is often a matter of judgment by an experienced teacher. Get it wrong, and difficulties may arise, but get it right, and you can inculcate in a pupil an attitude of mind that can last a lifetime. However, we live in an educational system that seems to conspire against it: increasingly prescriptive curricula, more rigorous assessment, league tables, high stakes final examinations, among other factors, contribute towards creating a situation where anything that is not clearly focused on measurable outcomes - on the part of the school and pupil – is considered a potential distraction.

But teachers have to persevere in trying to make pupils increasingly responsible for their own learning because the alternative is...what? Spoonfeeding? Do we conspire in creating a culture of risk-averse, over-dependent young people who are ill-equipped to deal with the demands of higher education and the pressures of work (but who might get good examination results)? Few teachers have gone into the profession to do this, although all will have felt competing pressures to do just that.

What we have to do is develop in our young people an ability to work on their own, and with their peers, both in the classroom and outside. We have to provide them with the skills to self-monitor, so that they know that they are progressing (or not), and to see work not as something to endure, but as something that is enjoyable and, ultimately, liberating. But we cannot assume that pupils will somehow, instinctively, know such things, and have the intellectual apparatus, to achieve an independence of mind.

Great schools develop in their pupils a real pride in their progress, but also an understanding of how they develop. And great teachers give their pupils the vocabulary to make sense of their own learning. Key to this is discussion, and reflection. Bryanston does both through the weekly charts, and through our unique tutorial system, but these can only ever work effectively if the pupil learns to play a full and active part in each: it is in both that a personalised focus of academic achievements (and challenges) is developed. And when this happens, ideally, pupils begin to learn that education is not something done to them, but with them, a joint endeavour undertaken between teacher and pupil, and with a shared destination in mind: independence in the truest, and most empowered form, because it comes with a real sense of purpose and responsibility.

Academic Bryanston…a new boy’s impressions

This week we are delighted to welcome our Deputy Head, Academic, David James, with a guest blog on his first impressions of Bryanston's academic system.

David James

Every independent school in the UK likes to see themselves as unique: they might market themselves as distinctive, but the language used on websites, or in glossy brochures, often has the same buzzwords and phrases (‘holistic education’, ‘well rounded individuals’, ‘self-confident’ and so on, as if there are any schools in the country who would not endorse these). The reality is that most schools have more in common than they would care to admit (and I would include state schools in that): teachers teach their pupils, mark their work, enter examinations, and then send them out into the real world. Bryanston, however, really is different: the modified Dalton Plan, upon which Bryanston’s academic system is based, puts it into a tiny minority of schools worldwide. When I worked at Dauntsey’s I knew of Bryanston from afar, and ever since then have wanted to know more about it: did it really work in practice, rather than in theory? What results did it get? And so after nearly a term of being here I think I’m beginning to get a sense of the school’s academic system. It’s been an education!

We know from the recent ISI inspection that Bryanston is officially ‘excellent’ in every category. And I know from conversations with the inspection team that one of the (many) things that impressed them about the school is our academic system: it was seen as a unique and integral part of the school’s identity, and something which clearly added real value to the quality of our pupils’ learning. The inspectors noted that:

In line with the school’s original founding aims, teaching is effective in promoting pupils’ progress through learning to work independently, guided by individual tutoring.

It was Bryanston’s ‘one-to-one’ support that was singled out as a means of ‘promoting the pupils’ personal development’. This progress is at the core of every pupil’s experience of Bryanston: there is an emphasis placed on individualised care and support, so that everyone, regardless of their ability, is able to meet with an adult (either a tutor or their subject teacher) to discuss their studies, as well as their extracurricular commitments. It is this ‘close connection’ that, the inspectors said, contributed to the ‘rapid progress’ they make in their subjects, and it also explains why so many OBs retain such a strong bond with the school.

Key to this is the tutor. In most schools tutoring is unevenly delivered: in boarding schools tutors usually have a group of about 10 pupils whom they see once a week; usually, they give this group up after one year. It could not be more different at Bryanston: here, a tutor has individual tutorial pupils whom they meet, one-to-one, every week. There is no group because we view everyone as an individual. And this selection of tutorial pupils is governed not by house, but by a careful process of selection. Crucially, the tutor remains with their tutorial pupils throughout their school career, ensuring a mutual, and deep, form of understanding and trust.

Correction periods build on this: at Bryanston each sixth form pupil will see their subject teachers one-to-one once a week to discuss key areas of their course. This can be transformative for the pupil who can quickly go from a sense of uncertainty about a topic, to one of insight and understanding. Again, the key here is that personalised care. Compare and contrast that with the increasingly depersonalised, screen-driven ‘interactions’ that dominate our digital lives. Little wonder that the system is so valued, and felt by many to be authentic, have academic rigour, and the pupils’ interests at its heart.

I have visited a lot of schools in my career, both as an inspector, and as someone interested in different school systems. Among those that have impressed me most are the fully IB schools in the Netherlands and Germany, the Harkness schools in New England (such as Philips Andover and Philips Exeter), and the Core Knowledge schools in New York. These are very different, but equally world class, institutions. But Bryanston’s academic system is equal to them because, like them, we have an academic philosophy that works and an ethos that supports it. More importantly, we know that the academic system we have works for us, rather than because a new government initiative says it should. That’s not to say it cannot improve: it can and will, but I hope that the school continues to remain true to its founding principles, adapting its approach on its own terms. That is the value, and measure, of true independence.