Mr. Adam Pettitt

FROM HIGHGATE SCHOOL, NORTH LONDON

Mr. Adam Pettitt speaks to us about the values at Highgate School, as well as their partnership with London Academy of Excellence Tottenham, the importance of pupil voice and Highgate’s core teaching philosophy.

Could you tell us about the values and ethos at Highgate School?

I was thinking about this, and I think our young people would say that we have three values: the first being to do what you love and what you’re good at. Exams are incidental; they may be an important learning experience, but how you travel to your destination is important. In boring grown-up speak, we call school a place for learning and scholarshipthere is an idea that you arrive as a dependent child needing adults to help you, but you want to leave having acquired the skills to set your own agenda and secure your own academic and employment aims.

I think the children would also say that serving others, rather than your own interests, is a rewarding and fulfilling way to lead your life. We’re a well-resourced school, we’re an advantaged school and we have an obligation and ability to contribute to other people’s learning outside our community - we call that being a reflective community. We need to see the impact that we as individuals - and therefore, grossed up, as a community - have on others.

The third value is that we all need balance in our lives, so what you do beyond work and beyond the classroom really does matter. That’s how you’re going to make and sustain friendships. What parents and teachers can do to build students’ happiness is provide ways for young people to spend time together, so that they find friendships that counteract the virtual world and create a lifelong ability to meet new people and take interest in them, regardless of their background.

I think, broadly speaking, those are our three values. I think they’ll resonate with a lot of people because they are things that are important for all young people, but I suppose the argot we use to describe them probably helps them to become anchored in what we actually try to do, day by day.

You work especially closely with London Academy of Excellence, Tottenham. Can you tell us a bit about your work with them, and how this partnership benefits the pupils there and at Highgate?

London Academy of Excellence is right next door to Tottenham Hotspur Football Club; it’s five miles away from us, at the other end of long, stretchy boroughs. Until 2016, only 1% of young people who took their A Levels in that part of the borough were progressing to Russell Group universities - young, aspirational people weren’t leaving the borough and going elsewhere, so there was a real sense that something needed to be done.

We’d been a player in the partnership area for quite a long time, and so we were invited in by the school’s commissioner, by a local council and others, to consider if there was an opportunity for a partnership to help create an academically focused local school for young people in Tottenham, so that they would be able to go to school somewhere and think of Tottenham as a brilliant place to live, work, study and grow up. We took on that challenge very happily, and we’re now the oldest school and London Academy of Excellence is the youngest school.

They are The Sunday Times Sixth Form School of the Year 2020, they are a high-achieving, very ambitious school with just under 700 students, 60% of whom are going to Russell Group universities. We are also an academically selective and highachieving school, but both of us are pretty bubbled communities.

Young people tend to live and socialise through their schools, and we are at one end of the borough, and they are at the other - both of us are pretty bubbled communities. So, the Head and I both believe that giving the students the opportunity to meet and experience what our schools have in common and what sets them apart, and to think about the kind of issues that schools have faced, is better done together.

I suppose that the young people are probably leaving both schools more equipped with meeting people they don’t have to meet. Therefore, when they do go to university or into the world of work, they are conscious that you need to render yourself interesting and open to other people who may have something in common with you, like your age, but otherwise won’t know the way that your school worked. I think the young people are really excited about that, and as teachers we’ve tried to step back and allow those things to grow, but we’ve also facilitated it on a boring level of how you can meet each other, and which things are likely to work, and which are less likely to work.

Overall, I think this partnership has clearly created a brilliant school. It has the two words ‘Tottenham’ and ‘Excellence’ together in its name, which young people hadn’t seen before in an educational context, and I think they are hugely proud of that. I’m a governor there and I’m struck by the excitement and pride that the young people take in their community and in their school, and I think that that rubs off on my students, who, in a way, are not given to thinking that their school is something they should be proud of. It may be that they have affection for the individuals within it, but actually being proud of a private or independent school is perhaps, in the twenty-first century, not something all young people will do, and it’s been interesting to have that modelled differently in both directions.

What is Highgate School’s core teaching philosophy, can you tell us a bit more about that?

I do remember a school once telling me that in the 1960s they would write a timetable based on who turned up the first day, but we don’t work like that now. But there is certainly that freedom there, and that is really embedded in certain kinds of thinking, such as the ‘IBAC’, which consists of four elements.

The first is this idea of ‘Independence’, which is what you really want children to have developed by the time they’re finished with education. The next is ‘Buzz’, which carries the idea that lessons should be exciting. That doesn’t mean to say that they all have to be all-singing, all-dancing, but there should be a moment when there’s a reason they’re all together, an alchemy between teacher and pupils, and between themselves - this is why I think that online learning, while it has its place, is not as good. ‘Aspiration’ obviously expresses that you want to have hopes and desires which you want to fulfil. ‘Collaboration’ used to be a dirty word, it used to be synonymous with ‘cheating’. But now it holds the idea that people should be working together, not only because it has been facilitated by online platforms, but also because it is an excellent way for young people to share ideas, critique others and make certain that they understand something.

One of the key things I spend my time doing is telling parents to stop opening the oven door early to check whether the cake is rising - you know, that sense of wanting to know how well your child is doing, how good their GCSE results are, how well they’re doing with Oxbridge, et cetera. I tell parents to stop doing that, as they’re putting their child on a sort of automated walkway to a set of outcomes, because you want to be sure your children arrive somewhere successfully, but in doing so you’re sort of shutting down whatever they might discover about themselves.

We also make sure that pupils do four A Levels to counteract the idea that three is a ‘good’ number, even though once upon a time it was. Four is a ‘bad’ number, it’s far too few, but at least it’s better than three. We like people to choose things which don’t necessarily line up; not everybody needs to do four aligned subjects - to have complimentary subjects, that is a great thing to see. And the greater diversity we see in the A Levels young people are doing, the happier we are.

Can you explain more about the importance of the pupil voice at Highgate?

During the ‘Everyone’s Invited’ movement, seeing the difficulties that hit most schools, I pondered the anger young people were feeling and how they were articulating it, and questioned how we could turn that anger into something positive, beyond the important interventions and the work that schools were doing with external services.

I think that it goes back a little bit to the difference between how young people at LAET feel about their school - that sense of pride that it’s their school and mostly about them - and schools like Highgate where there’s been quite a negative portrayal of independent schools in the press, increasingly so over the last ten years. You rarely open any form of media without seeing it mentioned that someone attended a private school - regardless of what’s happened to them, whether they’ve been in a tragic accident or have been sent to prison - it will nearly always say “alumnus of…” or “former pupil of…” a privately educated school, and then the fee. It almost becomes a defining characteristic and if viewed dispassionately, that could become a negative thing. It’s similar to the idea that you’ve only achieved what you have because you had a silver spoon in your mouth for your whole education, or you got good A Level grades, or you went to a good university; in reality, it’s because the teaching was better, and there’s very little sense that these achievements are because of your own efforts and agency. I did wonder whether there was an element of that.

It’s become more difficult for young people to feel proud about the school they go to if they are from an advantaged background or a very successful school. It’s almost like the more successful the school is in terms of grades, perhaps the more difficult it is for an individual to feel like they have achieved something significant - there seems to be a sentiment like: www.highgateschool.org.uk

“Well, you would have achieved something, wouldn’t you?” And I suppose one of the things we did during ‘Everyone’s Invited’ was that we had a lot of listening exercises where young people could explain their feelings and experiences, and they could talk with members of staff or with external voices. It was very powerful to see that, once the downloading of thoughts and emotions was there, there was a real desire to understand more in order to be able to influence decision-making. Not that we want young people to feel that they are responsible for running the school or running the world, but in the sense that, if they have achieved an understanding of a situation, they slow down their criticism of it. You speak to a twelve-year-old and if there’s a problem with queues for the buses, for example, they think that someone somewhere can wave a magic wand. It takes a bit of time to get that, but it becomes quite exciting and empowering for young people to get involved.

And so the student voice, for us, was about having opportunities to talk about everything and anything, so that if there is something significant that our students want to talk about, they know how and where to do it, whether that’s confidentially online with a teacher they can trust; the wellbeing team; a senior member of staff; or me. Whether you’re in the student council or on one of the committees that the young people have suggested they set up - we have a Wellbeing, Inclusion, Safeguarding and Pastoral Committee, or WISP, they are able to critique what the school is saying or doing, for example if a PSHE lesson has landed well or poorly - they have an opportunity to look at that, take it apart and make suggestions.