Mr. Edward Venables

FROM EAGLE HOUSE SCHOOL, BERKSHIRE

Founded in 1820, Eagle House is one of the country’s oldest preparatory schools, located in Sandhurst, Berkshire. The school has around 120 pupils in its Pre-Prep and Nursery, and over 230 pupils in the Prep School. Many Year 8 pupils from Eagle House are awarded scholarships from their choice of senior school, and the school takes pride in its excellent academic record.

Mr. Edward Venables speaks to us about the benefits of boarding at Eagle House, their Golden Eagle Programme and how their curriculum is preparing pupils for a future within a fastchanging world.

We understand that you started your new position as Head of Eagle House School in September 2023. You were the long standing Head of Admissions at Wellington College and have now taken over at Eagle House as Headmaster. How do you believe your previous experiences will contribute to your insight as Head and leadership of the school?

Thanks so much for having me, Chloe, it’s very, very exciting to be here! Going back a little bit further, I first worked in the city for twelve years in banking and hedge funds. I was Head of Department at Wellington, a House Master, which was the best job in the world, and I also acted as Director of Admissions. Critically, I was also a Designated Safeguarding Lead at Wellington, which has very much formed who I am now and how I look at school. Understanding what the world of work looks like now, how a modern senior school is preparing children for that world is really, really critical. Aligned with that, having an understanding of the mental health challenges and other pastoral pressures that teenagers face allows me to work incredibly hard to equip the young people who come through Eagle House with the skills to be as prepared as possible for that next stage of their life. There’s a lot of work needing to be done on that transition from Years 8 to 9, as well as on the transition from Years 4 to 5, interestingly. At the heart of this, really, is pastoral care and understanding that we need to prioritise pastoral care for children of prep school age, so they are ready to flourish in the senior school world.

On the website you describe Eagle House as ‘progressive, friendly and buzzy’. Can you tell us a little more about the ethos and values at Eagle House?

Our values are kindness, respect and courage. As with many schools, we reiterate these values regularly, but crucially we talk about them the whole time - they are the basis for all of our disciplinary interventions. We very much see ourselves as a positive school, but obviously, when children get things wrong, we need a framework around which to have the conversations. Our values are critical to that and the school is such a genuinely friendly place - when you visit, you see happy children.

I think our staff offer a supportive and unstuffy relationship with the children, which helps the children form relaxed and friendly relationships with one another. We’re ‘buzzy’ because the children are busy: they’re going from activity to activity all day, and crucially, they’re doing so in an independent way.

What are the main requirements and points of entry for children and families considering applying to Eagle House?

We’re progressive in that we’re not afraid to make changes as the world around us changes. Specifically, we’ve just built a whole programme into our digital curriculum around learning about the operation and ethics of AI. We’re changing PSHE, which is our ‘Learning for Life’ programme, to address the new and ever-changing issues affecting our young people. So, it’s busy but it’s fast-moving, which is exciting!

There are no specific requirements, other than that children must be able to flourish in our environment. Of course, being happy matters deeply to us, so the children must be able to access our curriculum and feel happy with the pace of life at Eagle House. Children can join any stage from nursery to Year 8 if we’ve got spaces. About two-thirds of our children end up going on to Wellington College, but it’s not an automatic transition, so we do need to be realistic with children and parents.

How do you think the children benefit from their boarding experience at Eagle House?

Boarding at Eagle House, whether it’s a couple of nights a week, a full week or two weeks at a time, is great fun! It also brings out that sense of independence we’re fostering at Eagle House: the social skills you gain from spending extended time with all sorts of different people are immense and you get to learn different things from getting close to older and younger children. It’s different to the senior school world in this sense, but you’ve got loads more siblings and it’s so lovely to see the children engaging with others that are both older and younger than them.

Prep boarding often gets described as a giant sleepover, but it’s so much more than that. As with most boarding and senior schools, having most of the evenings with us allows so much time for extra pastoral care and the learning about yourself stemming from that. I think, for those going on to board at senior school, it also provides an opportunity to get used to it a little bit - most of them start with two nights and then request more nights because they love it!

The core pillars at Eagle House include: ‘Confidence, Friends, Passion and Skills for Life’. Could you tell us a little about how these are embedded into the daily life of the pupils? They’re embedded in everything we do and that really is the lifeblood of the school. For example, they’re embedded in our clubs programme, where every child picks at least three weekly clubs from a massive list of academic, sporty and creative activities. The children take part in independent play in our woodland at break - seeing children create and use a crazy golf course that they made from pine needles is amazing; or performing a play in Wellington’s modern and vast theatre, or speaking in assembly in front of peers; playing a match against another school at least once a week; or, most excitingly jumping off a cliff into the sea in north Wales on our Golden Eagle trip. In short, everything we do is focused well beyond simply acquiring academic knowledge and preparing children for the dreaded senior school entrance tests.

On the website it states: ‘Design, code and create. Today’s experience is tomorrow’s invention, and who knows where this will take you.’ We are now living in a fast-changing world and it is expected that, in the next five years: ‘Employers anticipate 69 million new jobs to be created and 83 million eliminated - a net decrease of 14 million jobs, or 2% of current employment.’ (Economic Forum). Is this what you feel Eagle House is preparing the children for?

Whenever I meet new parents, I say to them that the world that our current prep age children will grow up into, post-university, is probably more unknown than it has been for many, many generations - we’re well aware of that and fully believe that that’s going to be the case, so we’re working on what we need to do about it. Primarily, we need to recognise the skills that they will need to flourish and stand out above others. In a world that’s driven by AI, these are going to be human skills, like empathy, proactivity, curiosity, curiosity, creativity, resilience, persuasion and entrepreneurship. Our education has always been designed to develop these skills, but it is even more so now. We’re actually working on ways that we can track them at all age levels, too, so in the same way that we track academic attainment, I want to be tracking age-related resilience and age-related creativity, for instance.

Running alongside that, we have an AI curriculum already, which gives children the skills required to prepare them for further learning at senior schools. They need to develop the ability to fully understand prompt engineering and everything that you use to make the most out of AI. So, we need to introduce our children to the concept of prompt engineering and how it works on a small scale - we’re already doing that in Art at the moment, where we use an AI programme requiring the children to describe their face - the AI programme then draws a self portrait of them and it’s such a good example of teaching them how these models work. It’s really exciting! I think the main concept is that we need to be brave to experiment with new things as technology changes and new opportunities open up. If there’s anything we’re going to be, it’s an early adopter of all of these things going forward. We’ll make mistakes, but we will be ahead of the curve as well. This way, we’ll be setting the children up to be very well placed to do this in future.

Could you tell us a little about the Golden Eagle Programme?

Golden Eagle is our Character Education programme, incorporating outdoor learning, leadership and service. It’s designed to allow the children, along with everything we do on the pastoral care front, to know who they are as people. If you know who you are as a person, you’re going to go to your senior school and be confident in who you are, you’re not going to be swayed by what’s cool or uncool. Whether the children are doing leadership challenges with us outside their comfort zone; doing a really long walk; helping to keep our local heathland healthy; cleaning churchyards; or on a week-long residential, they’re learning who they are and developing their characters. We are going to develop this programme so much more in conjunction with Wellington College over the coming years, but it is all about character education, because character education is what you’re going to need to survive in this AI-driven world.

What is your vision for the future of Eagle House going forwards?

My vision is to ensure that every child who leaves www.eaglehouseschool.com

Eagle House is fully prepared to flourish and be successful for the rest of their lives. Now, what does that mean? Specifically, I talked about wanting the children to be the best children at their next schools. Now, that doesn’t mean they’ll be the best academically or that they’ll be captain of their sports teams, but it means that, when the House Masters and House Mistresses are asked who the best children in their houses are, they’ll say: “It’s the children from Eagle House, because they are academically curious and intrinsically motivated. We never have to push them to sign up for things because they’re making the most of all the opportunities here. Crucially, they’re the ones who are kind to others and they help build the community that we’re in.” If we can get to that stage, it will be amazing because we will be setting those children up for happy futures and they’ll be showing such a passion for life.

We’re going to achieve this with a rigorous and complete focus on pastoral care. We’re building a purpose-built wellbeing hub over the summer and we’ve got a modern academic curriculum toowe’re investing in our facilities and our staff. We’re aiming to grow Year 7 and 8 by adding an extra class, because these years are so important in prep school. It’s about setting our children on the path to future happiness. We really believe that these are the most important years, where you can make a proper difference to children’s lives. It’s a privilege to be doing what we’re doing.

We would like to thank Mr. Edward Venables, Headmaster at Eagle House School, for giving up his time to speak to us.