Character, Courage, Conscience
“ This is an outstanding Academy. Central to this is the relentless pursuit of excellence by leaders and managers and the highest aspirations for every student.� Ofsted 2012
Your daughter’s
education Thank you for requesting a copy of our prospectus and for considering Harris Girls’ Academy East Dulwich for your daughter’s education. We recognise that there is nothing more important than finding a school where she will be happy and safe, thrive academically and socially, and realise her full potential. This is an outstanding school. Your daughter, whether an academic high flier or someone who finds academic learning more challenging, will make outstanding progress; indeed, all of our students make more progress here than in 97% of other schools in the country. We are incredibly proud of the dedication of our girls and the staff who help make this happen. Teaching is outstanding across the Academy because staff are well qualified, highly trained and totally committed to transforming the lives of the girls with whom we work. We know that our students will leave us academically successful, but we also want them to be well-rounded individuals with a highly developed social conscience, ready to lead in their communities and beyond. Everything that we do, from assemblies to after-school activities, is designed to develop the values of courage, character and conscience in your daughter; she will leave Harris Girls’ Academy East Dulwich ready to take on the challenges of the world beyond school. We believe that all students should have access to the best that education has to offer and so singing and musical instrument lessons are offered free of charge, including the provision of an instrument. Each year we organise numerous trips in London, across the UK and abroad. We believe a rich and vibrant curriculum, embracing the arts, design and creativity, the humanities and the sciences is an entitlement for every child. Please do visit us on our open days and chat to our students and teachers about their experiences here. It really is a marvellous school and we would be delighted to welcome you. Mrs Carrie Senior, Principal
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A safe and welcoming
community for our Year 7s
We recognise how important it is that your daughter settles well into her new life at secondary school. Moving to secondary school can be scary – but not here. Our intake of only 150 girls is intentionally small so that your daughter can be known as an individual. Transition to secondary school starts well before the summer holidays with staff visiting our feeder primary schools to speak to primary teachers about how to help your daughter be successful. Our induction day in July gives all of our new girls a chance to meet their new friends and teachers for the first time. Any students with additional educational needs have a second day to prepare for the change coming in September. The first day in September is just for Year 7. All of our students will have a form tutor and a buddy or mentor to look after them, and sixth formers are buddied up with
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Year 7 groups for additional support. Our Health Hut offers our ‘mistakes lab’ experience, which helps girls learn that making mistakes is part of learning, and our week-long residential visit for Year 7 establishes strong bonds between the girls (and the staff) early on. You’ll notice that senior staff and the pastoral team are on the gate every morning to welcome your daughter and to see her safely off home at the end of the day. The pastoral team and senior staff will frequently be seen in your daughter’s lessons, in corridors and in the playground so that the Academy is consistently positive and calm. Both teams are highly visible because we recognise how important feeling safe is to learning successfully.
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“ The teachers are dedicated and of a high standard. Each teacher takes a genuine interest in encouraging the girls to achieve their full potential.� PARENT
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Our
curriculum
Our curriculum is wide ranging, inclusive, and deliberately challenging. We believe that all girls should have to work hard to learn. This means that whether your daughter needs to be stretched well beyond the usual, is struggling with literacy or numeracy or is somewhere in the middle, we will always work to inspire the best in her. In Year 7, your daughter will have lessons in English, maths, science, history, geography, religious education, art, design technology, drama and music. Design technology includes food preparation and nutrition, graphics, resistant materials and textiles. Students start with Spanish, but other languages are offered for their GCSEs. We also offer a range of other languages for those who might speak them at home – such as Polish, French, Portuguese, and Bengali. There is also one hour of sport per week, many sports clubs at lunch and after school, and an hour of computer science. We are proud girls’ champions in the Federation Sports Day. We have a formal reading scheme in which your daughter will read a book each week throughout Year 7, Year 8 and Year 9. The result of this is that our girls are able to become confident readers with good knowledge of the classics and contemporary literature. Your daughter will begin studying formally towards her GCSEs throughout Year 9, which spreads her workload over three years instead of two. This means that our girls get a wide choice of creative, vocational and traditional option subjects at GCSE and are able to follow an inspiring curriculum, that’s just right for them. Option
selections are made in individual meetings with you, your daughter and a senior member of staff. We go to every length to ensure lessons are engaging: we’ve even installed a real ambulance in one of our classrooms where students interested in health and medical careers can get hands-on experience to supplement their theoretical learning. There is one-to-one and small group tuition for students who need it, as well as an enrichment curriculum which includes a lecture series and in-house publishing. As part of our Harris experience, we aim to give our Year 9 students a taste of university life through visits to a Russell Group university or an Oxbridge college – this gives them a taste of what is to come as they work hard and apply themselves. In order to make sure our curriculum is really broad, we teach 26 one hour lessons per week. This means that school finishes slightly later on a Monday (at 4:10pm), rather than at 3:10pm. We send reports home three times a year and make regular contact via telephone and email so that parents always know how their daughter is progressing. We keep classes small – the average size is around 22 students. Consolidation and regular checking of learning are key features of lessons in our Academy. We encourage students to be studious, articulate and resilient learners who understand that we are all on the same side and who are passionate about doing well.
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Developing students’
interests
Opportunities outside the classroom are endless. As well as weekly visits and trips that are directly related to curriculum areas, there is a residential Outward Bound trip for Year 7 to Wales. We encourage all of year 7 to attend. The Summer Extravaganza runs for students in years 7-9 whose conduct has been exemplary. Many of our students love the arts, something we do everything we can to encourage. There are regular theatre, dance and photography visits, as well as trips to art galleries across London, and as far as Paris and Vienna. Our art department hosts a thriving art research centre, bringing together academia and education in a unique partnership. Students in history visit the Imperial War Museum, Maritime Greenwich and the Houses of Parliament. Our choir have sung at a dinner for the Prime Minister and they perform for a wide range of audiences. Our girls perform annual musicals and the concert is a highlight of the school year.
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There are clubs every day after school, such as trampolining, pottery, Italian and boxing. Public Speaking clubs, our Debate Cake events, the Feminist Society and the School Council all help to enrich our students’ experiences.
Our annual East Dulwich Literary Festival offers all students the opportunity to participate in a wide range of trips, performances and workshops designed to develop a love of literature that will stay with students for the rest of their lives. Past highlights have included a performance of Romeo and Juliet by the Young Shakespeare Company, a one-man show by the great-great grandson of Charles Dickens, workshops with poets and an evening with the author, Adele Geras.
Students have also created a social enterprise, called HOPE (Helping Others Promoting Enterprise). They have raised over £25,000 for charities by selling products they have made such as cupcakes. Frequent charity events and campaigns, such as the Amnesty International Write for Rights campaign, promote a detailed understanding of the wider world. The girls also lead on our very successful school bookshop, and, working in conjunction with Moon Lane Ink, now run a publishing house to increase diversity in publishing. Many of our students opt for private singing or musical instrument lessons. Steel Pans is one of the most popular, but we offer brass and strings too. We subsidise the lessons to ensure that everyone can participate.
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Many of our students opt for private singing or musical instrument lessons. Piano is one of the most popular. We subsidise the lessons in full to ensure that everyone can participate.
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Sixth Formers
We are part of the Harris Federation Sixth Form and therefore education here is coeducational in Years 12 and 13. Our sixth formers are role models for our younger students. We offer a huge range of Level 3 (A level) academic and vocational qualifications. The Sixth Form offers everything our students love about their Harris education in an environment where they are treated as young adults. It involves a step change and a new relationship with teachers: our sixth formers wear suits not uniform and plan for a working day that fits in with a new type of learning. We give our Sixth Form students access to the top level professions, with the expectation that this is where our students will flourish. For example, our Psychology Department organises regular A Level conferences on key studies and research, bringing a range of professors and other specialists in their fields to present to our Sixth Form delegates. Neurosurgeons, artists and MPs have all delivered specialist sessions for our students to get a unique insight into the professional world beyond the academy.
Children at Nabiswa Community School, Uganda, pictured reading children’s books in their community language (Lugwere) for the first time ever, thanks to students at Harris Girls’ Academy East Dulwich. Our students worked with Professor Coates (Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, Roehampton University) to understand the construct of the Lugwere language and to create these books. The orthography for this language has only been written down in the past seven years and these are the first children’s picture books ever created in Lugwere.
Our students look at Sixth Form as the race to the finishing line of their pre-university education. This period of their education is filled with opportunities to develop their experience. The Evelina Children’s Hospital offers three internships a year to our A Level students wanting to study medicine. We also have links with top London universities including King’s, Imperial and Goldsmiths, enabling our students to attend university lectures and conferences. The Harris Federation Sixth Form has progression agreements with several excellent universities in London and the South East and is continuing all the time to expand this list. This means that, when our students make the grades, they are guaranteed an offer of a place at these universities. The Sixth Form regularly sends students to top Russell Group universities, specialist arts, drama and stage schools, and direct into training for the careers of their choice.
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Harris Federation Our academy is run by the Harris Federation, a not-for-profit charity with nearly 30 years’ experience of running happy and successful primary and secondary schools in and around London. The Harris Federation has an exceptional track record with academic progress far greater than the national average. Every Harris academy so far inspected by Ofsted is rated ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’, with the majority rated ‘outstanding’. The founder and Chairman of the Harris Federation is Lord Harris of Peckham. His vision of delivering happy and successful education is brought to life by an excellent team of teachers and leaders. As well as joint working between the teachers at our academies, there are many shared experiences for our students. These include federation-wide sports days at the National Sports Centre; Harris Experience, a unique programme that readies our most able students for life at top universities; and inter-academy events such as one-to-one reading partnerships between our primary and secondary schools, World Maths Day and Debate Mate. You can follow the Harris Federation on Twitter: @HarrisFed
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Each year for Sports Day, the Harris Federation hires the Crystal Palace Sports Stadium. With well over 10,000 student and staff spectators in attendance, Academies compete in team and individual sports. The sound of students cheering each other on is so loud that Team GB athlete Louise Jukes who happened to be nearby tweeted: “Can hear hundreds of kids screaming from the stadium at Crystal Palace! What a great noise! Kids loving sports day! Wish I was a kid again!”
From the Chief Executive The Harris Federation is a London charity with 30 years of experience in education. Our Academies combine the traditional values of good manners, strong discipline and smart uniform with the best of modern teaching and technology. Harris Girls’ Academy East Dulwich is an outstanding Academy producing confident, articulate and successful young women. Working closely together in and around London, Harris Academies are able to offer a far broader range of opportunities, far better training and professional development for staff and real success for our students. What makes this Academy so successful? Students who enjoy learning and look forward to coming to school each day; teachers and support staff who are genuinely ambitious for every student; a senior leadership team that consistently sets standards of excellence. If your daughter wants to come to an Academy with drive and ambition, then I hope you will attend one of its open events to find out more.
Sir Daniel Moynihan Ed.D, M.A., B.Sc. (Econ) Chief Executive of the Harris Federation
From the Sponsor As an employer and a father I strongly believe that a good education is the best start in life that you can give a child. Harris Girls’ Academy East Dulwich promotes hard work, curiosity of mind, integrity and ambition. It works tirelessly, in partnership with the other Harris Academies, to ensure the greatest success for every child, regardless of their ability or aptitude. I hope you will come along to our various Open Day or Evening Events to see for yourself the difference the Academy is making. Lord Harris of Peckham
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Homestall Road, London SE22 0NR T: 0207 732 2276 F: 0207 277 7785 Email: info@harrisdulwichgirls.org.uk www.harrisdulwichgirls.org.uk
www.hope-harris.org