British values

This week we welcome Second Master, Peter Hardy, who looks at what British values are and how they are embodied at Bryanston.

Peter Hardy

For many the idea of a boarding school typifies British traditions, values and culture. Bryanston has always taken what it believes to be the best of these traditions and values and combined them with new ideas and thinking – et nova et vetera in action.

All schools in the UK are now required to ‘promote fundamental British values’ rather than simply respecting them, as previous government guidance stipulated. This change in language from respecting British values to actively promoting them is one that has resulted in a close inspection of how we promote these values at Bryanston across the school, whether in the classroom or simply through our daily interactions with each other.

The government outlines the fundamental British values as:

• Democracy 
• The rule of law 
• Individual liberty 
• Mutual respect and tolerance of those of different faiths and beliefs.

As far as the rule of law is concerned, this is regularly emphasised. Pupils are taught about rules, regulations and expectations and this is underpinned by our own Rules and Regulations, Behaviour Policy and associated documents. The teaching of this is set in the context of the rule of law in the country as a whole and within the context of living together successfully in a full boarding school.

Pupils are also taught about the importance of making choices in the knowledge that they are living in a safe, secure and supportive environment at Bryanston. Individual liberty and personal freedom are emphasised, as are the risks that may apply. Underpinning this, boundaries and consequences are clearly laid out so that pupils are able to make their own sound judgements and informed decisions, as well as learning from their mistakes.

Respect for and knowledge of other faiths is welcomed, and is delivered regularly through both assemblies and also through the PSRE curriculum. In Chapel each week with D pupils the Chaplain promotes tolerance and a healthy respect for difference.

Underpinning all of this is the central role of democracy, which is also regularly promulgated in school assemblies and explored in various aspects of the curriculum and ECAs, including a Model UN and mock elections.

At Bryanston these values have been central to our ethos since our early days, even if we haven’t always labelled them as specifically “British”. Indeed, one could argue that these values are not unique to our own culture, either as a school or as a country. However one views them, it is clear that Bryanston pupils are exposed to the importance and significance of our shared British values and expected to live by them and be guided by them both in school and beyond.

Every year a new start

Every year I enjoy walking down to the pitches on the first Tuesday afternoon of the autumn term to see the new Ds in their brand new sports kit tackling the business of learning the ropes of rugby and hockey. The sports kit is pristine – you can even still see the folds in the shirts. It’s also a great deal of fun for me to see the members of staff involved with coaching these neophyte teams, teaching them, as actively as in a classroom, about the elusive skill of being both an individual and a member of a developing team.

A wise colleague of mine observed that there is one particular thing in a teacher’s job which distinguishes it from many other professions. And no, it’s not just the wonderful summer holidays. It’s that, in September, there is an enormous sense of turning a new page. Academic diaries change colour; new and/or updated policies are uploaded to the school website; all the children move on into a new year of learning; 172 new pupils enter the school. Few fellow professionals have quite the same ‘new shoes’ start to any session. And I think this makes teachers very fortunate.

Starting in a new school, or indeed in a new job, can be daunting. We do our level best to make sure that all who join us in September can quickly involve themselves – and be involved too – in activities so that relationships are forged through shared enterprise. And that goes for the staff too. Each year we welcome a number of new faces to the team. They hit the ground running and learn alongside the pupils the arcane vocabulary of HMC, ECA, Room 17 and other such Bryanston vernacular (though no pupil will ever be allowed in Room 17!).

One of our key new staff is David James who comes to us as our first Deputy Head Academic from his role as Head of IB at Wellington College. As an English teacher he is engaging in the classroom with a fair few Bryanstonians, new and returning, and I am much looking forward to watching him drive developments in the academic area. I’m also very pleased that he is here to help us remain a characteristic more-than-one-step-ahead of all the various changes in the examination sphere and he is, of course, charged in his wide-ranging brief with pushing the school onwards and upwards with individual as well as collective academic ambition and success. He’s already made a promising start.

So much for the nova. The vetera still thrives at Bryanston. Laurent Johnson and Pippa Quarrell each take on the role of Senior Tutor and their responsibility is to ensure all the new staff settle in and that the ever-evolving issue of appraisal (not a topic that gets many of us jumping out of bed in the morning) is further strengthened. Richard Boulton joins us from his role in charge of training for GB rowing as Head of Rowing at Bryanston and will build upon the loving work of Graham Elliot, who took care of the Boat Club for nearly 20 years. My own daughters owed their love of rowing to his work on the river. I know Richard will breathe an external gust into this rewarding corner of the school and I am looking forward to watching him coach aspiring Matthew Pinsents, Katherine Graingers and, more likely, lots of interested and enthusiastic youngsters who are starting in a boat for the first time ever.

There’s a sense of a new start every September and this September is no exception. I wish you all a fantastic beginning to your child’s new school year and hope to see lots of you at matches, concerts, and in the newly rebranded (Nero) Café!

People, not things

Another summer term has drawn to a close and another successful Speech Day has allowed us to send off with love and every best wish both departing staff and 150 or so departing A2s. It’s always a time of nostalgia (how can you forget those 18 year-olds as their 13-year-old selves, bright eyed, bushy tailed and very nervous, five short years ago?). But mostly this time of year is a time of looking forward, we hope not too sentimentally, to the great things ahead of them in life. It’s what makes this job of mine the best in the world.

Speech Day allows me to see these young men and women ready to move on and ready to achieve still more. It allows me too to say to them my final words as their Head. This year I spoke of David Foster Wallace, Ken Robinson and Gillian Lynne. The theme, as mine so often is, was about what really matters in life.

There can’t be anyone on the planet who has children in a school who hasn’t listened to Ken Robinson’s TED Talk. But those of you who don’t know David Foster Wallace’s This is Water might like to add it to your own summer reading list. It’s short because it’s a commencement speech (a graduation speech, I think, in British English) and it’s a really good read. He talks about the absolute necessity of knowing what it is that matters to you. Of never ignoring the blazingly obvious. Of looking after your inner self so that you can be a social and happy self too. I recommend it to you in the warmest terms. Here’s its opening, to whet your appetite:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning boys. How’s the water?”

And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

It’s important in life that we work out what we really need and what it is that really matters. It won’t be the size of your house or how much you earn that makes you happy. It will be how you feel about yourself and how you then interrelate with others. As David Foster Wallace puts it, “In the twenty years since my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand … that the liberal arts cliché about ‘teaching you to think’ was actually shorthand for a very deep and important truth. ‘Learning to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

For me, how I keep that control is by reminding myself of an old friend’s wonderfully simple, rather hippy mantra, “People, not things”. By reading and immersing myself, whenever I can, in an internal imaginative landscape. By spending time with my husband and daughters. By walking the dogs and finding time for quiet reflection.

The A2s, as they leave this wonderful garden, will go on to play their part in the world. We hope very much that they will take Bryanston with them. As part of them. Take with them the memories of their friends, their teachers, their (best in the world) Chaplain. We very much hope that they have learned to enjoy learning, of course; but more than that, that they have learned the importance of friendship, of shared experiences, of their own emotional and spiritual well-being. That they have real goals, not fake, hollow goals. That they know how to love life. That they put people before things.

I am about to sign off for a little while and head off for a summer holiday. I’m taking a pile of books up a long lane in Devon (with no internet connection, I hope), re-establishing my link with quiet, and having fun with family and friends too. I wish you all a wonderful and fun-filled summer too. See you all back refreshed in September.

Intelligent Life: David Foster Wallace, in his own words
Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
Huffington Post: People, not things, bring happiness, study shows