15 minute read
Education Corner Podcast Interview
EDUCATION CORNER PODCAST
FROM DULWICH COLLEGE
Dr. Joe Spence
Dr. Joe Spence, long-standing headmaster at Dulwich College, talks about the ethos and efforts being made to ensure they are a fully diverse and inclusive school for boys’ in London.
To begin, would you like to tell us a little about the ethos of Dulwich College?
Thank you, Chloe, it is delightful to be filling the niche at Education Corner. It is a real treat to be able to talk to you too. Yes, isn’t ethos such an interesting thing these days? There is such a stress on being more explicit about it. We are joining in on that, we like that challenge that is given by parents now to re-define it. I’d start by saying that for a long while now we have had the twin pillars, if I can call it this… I’ve been in this post now for twelve years. It is a social mission and an educational vision. I am proudly able to launch in and say that we are wanting to be a school of inclusivity. I’d start there, and when I say that, I mean wanting to be a school of access. We have 200 boys on bursaries at the moment. 150 of those are on full bursaries. I like the idea of being a school to which people can come for that socially transformatory fee relief. I’m sure this is something that we will talk about later, but I could well imagine being sector-wide eventually.
All of the things that came out of the pandemic that have led us to be more explicit about things such as, if you look at our website, we have a page which shows our ongoing response to all issues relating to race and gender, and our promotion of all peoples equally, in valuing them as an Equity and Respect page on the website. I suppose that the sense of there being a search for equity: we are not there anymore than any other institution. There is a sense that all must be respected. It is the sense that we have to work even harder than we once have done in order to make sure that this is a place where prejudice cannot exist. Prejudice is a human condition, but the messaging is such that people must understand why you have got to be so careful. You must respect all traditions. “They are there for the components of the evolving ethos of Dulwich College: a school of access; a school dedicated to a social mission; a school with a very strong sense of what it does as educators; and a sense of commitment to our place in social change.”
How do you feel being at an all-boys’ school helps the boys with their academic success? What do you feel the benefits are?
I’m not sure it helps or hinders their academic success, I mean, it is a fascinating question. If you had asked me if I’d be leading an all-boys’ school fourteen years ago then I would have said “No.”
I don’t think that boys learn that differently from girls. There is all sorts of neuroscience about
Dulwich College
the differences. I wouldn’t want to over emphasise that. I’m simply saying that we have created a space in which boys can learn in a way that seems to befit how they like learning.
I imagine that there is quite a lot of mixing with the girls, you have got some fantastic schools on your doorstep. It must be a part of everyday life. What does Dulwich College’s commitment to diversity and inclusion look like? Have you taken steps since the BLM movement and all the different things that have all been happening globally? Has it changed your approach at all?
I think that understanding the different things that they mean and where, maybe, the greatest emphasis has to be put and the greatest work has to be done. On the links with local schools, we are absolutely delighted. I used that phrase a
TURN TO P56 to hear about equality and inclusivity at King’s College Wimbledon few minutes ago, that not a week passes without the latest Free Learning initiative in or beyond the classroom. We have a dedicated team at the moment who are looking to work collaboratively, notably with James Allen’s Girls’ School as our number one sister school within the foundation, of three schools, of which Alleyn’s is the co-ed school. Not a week passes when we are not looking for new occasions, so just before we came on air, I was saying to you that we had a Junior School Forum last night. How lovely to lead the Junior School Forum where many parents were asking questions about what co-ed opportunities there were. At the end of this half term, we are about to have our first Junior Schools Orchestral Concert between the three schools. We’ve always done those things at a higher level. We have a joint Choir now with the girls of JAGS and the boys of DC.
I use that phrase as we are living through it in this social revolution and in a way, I suppose, my duty is to make sure that good comes to it, and that we are an evolving institution that is ready »
Educating boys
for the challenge. What we have found is that certainly we have taken the two staging posts. It is the fact, that it is almost tragic, that we almost needed a publicised tragic death to lead to the coalescing of forces, saying that this is not good enough. The death of George Floyd in 2020 really did lead to the BLM movement, taking on a new vibrancy, a new energy, may I dare call it a new confidence, to come forward and say: “You may think that you are doing something, but you are not doing it fast enough.” If I deal with it more philosophically, again, we can give practical examples if time allows. It is an absolute change from ignorantly using language like colour blind: “Ah, Dulwich is a very diverse community, look at our pupils.” We want to be a school of access, and I realise that there is a patronising note in that. It wasn’t meant this way, but there is a problem with pretending that there is not an issue there, if you talk of colour blindness, because it makes a chessboard situation.
Now we talk very much of colour consciousness, wanting to be respectful of all traditions and we listen to the lived experience of pupils, of our teachers of colour. Suddenly, once you do that, opening the door. I hope I never did, but I know there is a rhetoric around, “Oh, what a shame there are no Black male teachers out there that would come here.” It doesn’t need much, it needs a slight change to the way you advertise, a slight change to the way that you look at your long list, a spreading of the word that we are open, and of the very fact of what has changed globally and nationally that just means that we are getting more applications from people who probably once thought: “Oh, they probably wouldn’t look at me.” From that university, with that background, from that schooling. Now, everyone has been empowered to believe that they should look at me. They should be looking at me because they want to, or because of enlightened self-interest, or because they feel they must. It is the feeling of “I will be looked at”, and it has transformed things in an incremental way rather than in any other way. I wouldn’t say that we are yet a fully diverse community when it comes to staff or governors, but we have made substantial progress in that sort of way. The establishment of a Diversity and Inclusion Alliance: a group of pupils and teachers and operational staff, with some input from parent
Inclusion and Diversity
advisors, often working in this space including the African Caribbean Education Network. We have Flair Impact surveys that look at where you really are in race, and what your community says about where you are in race.
I’ve talked about our Free Learning days, weeks, months, and one of the most important of those has probably been Dulwich College Identity Awareness Month which we ran this year for the third time. It is a chance within the month of February for everyone to look at and celebrate the multiple identities that go to Dulwich and define them. It began with thinking of race, but it’s gone way beyond that to incorporate gender questions, sexuality questions. Have we done enough in terms of able-bodied and people who have protected characteristics in respect of disability? Do we need to think more carefully about opening doors there, like the way that we have in other areas? The great thing about the Identity Awareness Month is that it is literally in the month that David Lammy published his book Tribes, and he has come and given a talk to all of the kids, and all of the community, about different identities and how to celebrate being more than singly defined, because that, of course, is the greatest way to defeat fundamentalism. If you are accepting that you, yourself, can carry more definitions than the one pure characteristic that might be celebrated or become a danger to you. You are open to that. That is a very broad answer, but it’s the sort of progress that we’re making. Black History Month is very important. I used to be very scathing of it as tokenistic, and I, and a number of pupils and teachers of colour, would be with me on this. We don’t actually make a lot of it because we’re worried that: “Should it be for one month only? What is that saying? Do we not want to do more work to look at the curriculum? To embed things more?” I’d now say that we have changed our focus on that. To me, it is just a trigger and we have changed our focus on that, this is the trigger in November for the rest of our work this year. It isn’t about ‘tick’ we did Black History Month.
A year later, the death of Sarah Everard, to the generalised me too. movement, became explicit here in schools starting in London. The Everyone’s Invited movement led by Soma Sara. Then we had to look at questions of: “How are we progressing in terms of Gender Equity, what have we really done in that space?” By extension then, on the back of that LGBTQ+ pupils would come on board and discuss the abuse or harassment and the on-going banter that goes on in this world. Not enough has happened to change, and that is where we have moved towards having three strands of our diversity and inclusion work. One is Racial Equity, one is LGBTQ+ Rights, and the third is Gender Allyship. We understand that we are a boys’ school, so it’s about thinking what we can really be doing within that space. Our job is to be allies, and that leads very neatly into trying to educate the boys to realise that feminism is not about women versus men. It is not a girls’ issue. It is very powerful to move forward in that space and that is where we are at the moment.
We have talked about everyday sexism, we have had a brilliant whole school inset for teacher training going on from a body called Gendered Intelligence, just making us think about language, and again recruitment, retention, looking after
TURN TO P30 to read about the Education Corner podcast with rugby player Seyi Aiyegbusi
»
people who want you to think carefully about the gender question. Soma has been here, she hasn’t yet spoken to the full pupil body, but I’d love her to. She is very wary of taking up too many invitations, and again, just appearing on the tick list of a school who can say that they have had her in. What we did with Soma is bring her to a conference that was hosted amongst twelve independent schools of different definitions including co-ed, single-sex, boarding, and day. We have had Soma talk about the work of Everyone’s Invited, discussing what she means when she uses a term like ‘rape culture’, what she still finds coming notably out of young women, about how we need to move to make abuse absolutely untenable within our institutions as much as we can.
In addition, I haven’t talked a lot about the role of parents, but I must say in this, over these last two years we’ve encouraged conversations about what should be happening back at home as well as about what is going on in school. This has also been very important. “I am talking about access, and if I may use the language of the moment, levelling up. If a child passes our exams, we would look to find them a place, if we can find them the financial support to get here.”
How many bursaries does Dulwich College offer in an intake of 11+? How would a parent and child be able to find out about their eligibility?
There are over 200 bursaries of any weight, and 140 plus are full fee bursaries at the moment. They are means tested, we can talk about the possibility of having more than 30% of boys being on a form of fee relief. A lot of this still remains residual scholarships. Sometimes the awards change, when a student decides they are more interested in swimming than music, for example, and we are very adaptable with that. We are very sensitive to people who may have some capital, but be cash poor. We are very set in that being the change in London of late. What has changed in recent years, is that I am not talking about bursaries going into an absolute academic elite. Sometimes with our old boys I have to be very careful to make sure that I am not looking at the replication of Dulwich as a school that had 60 Oxbridge scholarships in the 1960s, and why can’t it return there? It is because we are in a very different world. I am talking about access, and if I may use the language of the moment, levelling up. If a child passes our exams, we would look to find them a place, if we can find them the financial support to get here. It isn’t a pseudo-scholarship scheme. The bursary is reassessed annually in a meaningful way, we make sure we are not being abused in
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Looking to the future
the use of our charitable funds. We want that to grow. We have a body of parents and old boys who are ensuring that we are a school raising more than a million pounds a year for bursaries, that is explicitly for bursaries. In our benefit of being within the Dulwich Foundation, getting money from the Dulwich Estate. We have another million coming from there. We still substantially have to top that up with whatever we can make in a given year. Every parent at Dulwich knows that they are also supporting this, that they have bought into a school where they know that they are supporting other students. We are a diverse school, and parents agree. They know that they are a part of a social mission. This is a better way to go forward.
The independent sector often gets bad press from the media, claiming that they are classist and a thing of the past. However, behind the scenes, many of these schools are changing, and creating changes, whereby schools are encouraged to say 33% of children are on full fees, 33% are on some fee relief, and 33% of children are on full fee relief. We could work with virtual schools and local authorities on this sort of work. I actually think that we are working toward a hybrid future where the independent and state schools come closer together. Once you have opened a door, you have opened it. Behind the ‘us and them’ divide, we all want the same thing. We all want access for all.
Just finally for the parents, what do you look for in boys joining Dulwich College?
We are an academically selective school. Our boys are coming in the top 15-20% academically. The first hurdle is that. Make sure that this is possible and if you really want it, we can find ways to work with that. Beyond that, we’re a big doing school, we have boys who ‘do’: joining clubs, societies, being committed. There is no such thing as a Dulwich boy, he doesn’t have to be a rugby player.
We would like to thank Headmaster Dr. Joe Spence, Dulwich College, for giving up time to speak to us.
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www.dulwich.org.uk
