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.

Keep talking

As the new school year gets well under way, Bryanston Head Sarah Thomas reflects on the importance of a good relationship between school and home, including her own experiences of this as a parent. 

Each year when I welcome new parents to the school at the beginning of September I talk about the importance of communication. It matters a lot that we, who look after pupils for the majority of time during term time, know what we need to know. It matters too that we as a school are in touch with parents to keep them in the picture. So I tell a series of silly stories to the new and slightly anxious parents sitting in front of me, leaving their 13-year-old in our tender care for the first time, in order to underline the fact that we are listening and will keep communicating and that we rely upon our parents to do the same.

I learned this lesson at Uppingham when I worked with the legendary Headmaster, Stephen Winkley. He told me of the time he was standing at the Leavers’ Ball watching the fireworks with particular parents whose child had been not entirely straightforward for the two sixth-form years. The parents turned to him and told him that their child was adopted and Stephen said to me, “In that moment, all of the previous two years made sudden, blinding sense.” Since then, even though I cannot nowadays imagine such an example happening, I learned his mantra: tell us what we need to know.

Some schools tell new parents to go away and leave them alone. That they are the experts and parents should leave it all to them. I have limited sympathies with this approach, but think it’s quite wrong. It can, of course, be very galling indeed to have a parent tell you how to run a school based entirely upon their knowledge (sometimes biased; often partial) of their own child and upon the fact that they once went to a school themselves. And we honestly do believe at Bryanston that we are pretty expert in the ways of adolescence. But, we also know that parents know quite a lot about their own child, that we will find this information extremely useful in terms of helping us do our job of looking after them as well as we possibly can, and that the relationship between parents and school is, at its best, a collaborative one. I’m pretty certain that the tutorial system at Bryanston allows for this collaboration to be done at a very individual level.

When my two girls were at school here they had two exceptional (now retired) housemistresses and two very different, exceptional tutors. What it’s worth making clear at this point is that as the Head of their school as well as their mother, I easily won the prize of the most embarrassing mother in the world. The elder daughter, who is and always has been the most gripped up of the four of us (which is another way of saying she is a force of nature), was tutored by Neil Boulton who did not allow her just to sail through academically but ensured, which neither my husband or I could have, that she represented the school at sport. He also got her out of various moments of hot water and I will always be deeply grateful to him for the way in which he did not allow me to be part of the problem. My younger daughter, who not once was in hot water, was tutored by the remarkable Hannah Fearnley, aka Doccy F, now housemistress of Greenleaves, and when my daughter was unsure or wobbly (I brought them up the same, I promise, and their parental genetic make-up was identical), Hannah kept her (and me) sane. She further ensured that this quiet and clever, uncertain and ambitious little girl more than fulfilled her potential. She is now a confident and happy young woman and I will always bless Hannah for her (ongoing) part in that. I know how lucky I have been. But it is this sort of support, direction, kindness, toughness, and honesty which I firmly believe is the basis of a grown-up relationship between school and both child and home, and I know how very highly I valued the support I had from these wonderful professionals.

Bryanston and Bryanstonians, present and past, make me more and more often sentimental. It must be my advancing age. It’s to do, I reckon, with the fact that the job of teacher, tutor, housemaster/housemistress, Head is a hugely privileged one. Certainly I know that my role allows me to spend time with such vibrant pupil talent and energy; and that sense of connection is never-ending, year on year, and goes on way beyond 18 and for a lifetime. What will our children end up doing in their lives? It may not be clear at 11,12,13 (at least I rather hope it’s not!), but with the sort of relationship between home and school that we’re aiming for here, you can know that these things will begin to become clear over the course of five years and that as your child (and yourself vicariously) pass through the occasional turbulence of adolescence, there will always be both a strong line in to your child and an ocean of professional support and love along the way.