SPECIAL FEATURE Everyone’s Invited and BLM
come up with responses together as a community. Coming up with our own Gender Equality Charter. This has been a document and a statement of our philosophy that has arisen from our students, from parents, from teachers and from our alumni. It really was a whole community effort. That’s fantastic, and is probably leading the way in that area as an awful lot took place in a very short space of time.
Yes, very quickly, the first thing we did was stop our pupils from having mobile phones during the school day. I really feel that this is such an important measure that if schools can take them, they should take them. These are highly addictive pieces of technology and we all know how powerful that is because we all are, one way or another, completely dependent on our phones and devices. For our kids, whose brains are still developing, it is so important that they have at least 6 hours a day when they are not connected to social media or on their mobiles. That is one really important thing that we have brought in and I feel it’s making a really big difference. Are there any other key changes that you feel that you have been able to bring to such a successful school?
We’ve done a fair bit actually. It’s funny, you’d think, with Covid and Everyone’s Invited happening that we haven’t yet got going in relation to changes. The really big area that matters enormously to the school and to me is our Partnership work and Partnership activity. We’ve been able to bring in two big elements to that: we’ve started a summer school, specifically for pupils who experienced learning loss due to Covid, especially students from schools around us and any pupils who are disadvantaged. That was supported by our pupils and our staff. They did that in the summer holidays and I, again, am unbelievably proud of that. We’ve also started the Alleyn’s Academy, which runs after school, offering top level PE Coaching and sports training, again for children from local schools who wouldn’t access it otherwise. We are over inundated, we have over 100 pupils who come and take part in that, so it’s an amazing thing and we have huge support from professional sporting organisations around us. We’ve also audited our curriculum and used TURN TO PAGES 34 - 39 to read about social mobility at Exeter University
a company called The Black Curriculum. They have run a diversity and race audit against our curriculums. It’s been a really interesting exercise that was fantastic for our Heads of Department. We also have the Gender Equality Charter, as I have already mentioned, but we’ve also started to explore. We’ve brought in ‘Bring your own device’, so students all bring in or have a device that they can use as a part of their learning. The next step is exploring ways in which we can use VR in our classrooms, which is really exciting! We have also just finished our first Multicultural Week, which is a fantastic week celebrating diversity and inclusion. We have had huge amounts of fun with dance, music, slam poetry, run by the pupils. It was fantastic! Alleyn’s has a Junior school and many children go on to join the Seniors. The key main entry point is 11 plus for the Senior school (there used to be 13 plus but that stopped about two years ago, so for seniors I imagine there is a 16 plus for Sixth form). What do you look for in children applying at 11 plus? What is it that you are looking for in a child at 11 plus?
Yes, you are right about the entry points. We do also sometimes have the occasional vacancies at unusual points, but yes, our main entry points are 11 and 16 (Sixth Form). What are we looking for? Gosh, the spirit of possibility. We are highly academic and competitive, so there is a need for a selective and competitive entry. But once that’s given, we’re looking for young people who are hungry for opportunity, who are curious and eager for the future and what it holds. You can see that really vividly in 11 year olds, that spark and that sense of right, what’s next? We also want people who really are unpretentious and grounded. I think that one of the big features, one of the
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