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.

Food for the soul

As the new term gets under way, Bryanston Head, Sarah Thomas, looks at the need for us all to explore our spirituality and find a way to feed our souls.

James Norton, thankfully appearing again on our television screens on Sunday evenings in Grantchester, this week spoke about how he felt television did too little to portray faith in a positive light and tended, instead, to focus on either exorcisms or cults. I suppose we should not be surprised on any level, neither that a man who read Theology at Cambridge and was attracted to playing the part of a vicar should raise such a view, nor that television has taken the popular, currently fashionable and, I think, lazy approach to what is by any measure one of the most important areas of our world.

When I was a little girl I went to a convent school and then, at 11, to an avowedly secular school. The Catholicism of the mid '60s was, for me, a puzzle. It involved my class polishing our own desks (because no one else did) and raising money for the starving children in Biafra (a country whose location no one bothered to explain). Vatican 2 meant the Mass was in English and catechisms went out of the window. Then my 11+ school, Birkenhead High School GPDST, taught me that being non denominational meant notices, hymns (admittedly rather better ones than the Catholic versions), a reading and prayer once a week. All in all, it was a bit ‘meh’.

Having spent the years following my mother’s sudden death when I was 11 forgetting all I ever knew of religion or belief, and actively avoiding church, I then taught at Uppingham, where Chapel is at the centre of the school and where the Chaplain, Alan Megahey (the master of the three-minute sermon), and a tradition of superb Chapel music did something totally unexpected: they drew me back to the idea of faith through a sense of belonging.

So I believe schools have a real part to play in allowing pupils to explore their spirituality. By all means we should also teach ecumenical approaches and remove ignorance about world religions. But if we are to prepare our children to be happy in their world, we should, in my view, also allow them to consider the issue of faith both intellectually (who shouldn’t be exposed to credibile est quia ineptum est?) and emotionally. Our lives need mystery. Faith is one way of exploring what we cannot immediately understand; science and philosophy others. I believe all those elements deserve proper consideration and none should be pooh poohed. At Bryanston, our pupils are encouraged and supported to discover their own personal spiritual fuel in a number of ways, for example through one of the diverse extra-curricular activities, the breadth of curricular and sporting options, or through discussions with the Chaplain, who meets with Ds (year 9) once a week in Chapel to prepare them for that freedom of choice in worship which is the normal Bryanston pattern. And, whatever their faith, the Chapel provides pupils a place of warmth and peace for private prayer or simply somewhere to be quiet.

I’m on record in various places as saying I cannot imagine carrying out the role of Head without having my own, often rickety, faith. The idea that there is not something more important than my current preoccupations (which are more than occasionally solipsistic) fills me with gloom; part of keeping my mental well-being on a nearly even keel is attending church and being refreshed weekly, either at the school church with the remarkable Andrew Haviland leading our lively worship, or when I’m on holiday in the still more august setting of Bath Abbey. I’ll never understand what or exactly why I believe, but communion with friends and weekly ritual certainly fills my tank. I know it’s fashionable to sneer at this, as though it were an embarrassing weakness, but I am long past caring what people think of me, certainly in terms of how clever or not they think I am. I do what works for me. And I do my best.

If you can’t do something like this at least weekly then I think it’s harder to fill that tank. You might get your fuel from music, drama, sport, some or all of which can touch the soul at a deep level. You might satisfy that need for mystery through the world of archaeology or molecular biology or neuroscientific study, thereby seeing yourself as the speck in human existence that we each are. You might have the strength of intellect to find this sustenance entirely from humanism. I take my hat off to you if you do especially when you are in extremis. For some, meditation might help (though recent research suggests that’s much more likely if you are female). But for me, the most sincere and immediate way to find sense and hope in life is through trying to make sense of my faith.

So let’s take on board what Mr Norton says and do our bit in school to keep our children educated and emotionally fed with faith, curiosity, and mystery.