Education Corner Podcast Interview

EDUCATION CORNER PODCAST

EDUCATION CORNER PODCAST INTERVIEW WITH PRINCIPAL

FROM QUEEN’S GATE SCHOOL, KENSINGTON

Miss. Amy Wallace

Miss. Amy Wallace speaks about the benefits of attending an all girls’ school in Kensington, her new role as Principal, their ethos of ‘kindness and courtesy’, spirit of individuality and her vision for the school going forwards.

To begin, we understand that you took over as Principal in September, but you have had a variety of different roles and responsibilities in schools prior to this post. Would you like to tell us a little bit about them?

I have spent my whole career in girls’ education. I started as a fresh-faced NQT at Wycombe Abbey, having already done a year there as a resident tutor. I’ve just been committed to girls’ education ever since. I think we offer the girls in our care a real step up and some real specialist support, and I think we’re a very important part of the sector. I have spent the last ten years in through schools from ages 4 to 18, and when I was starting to think about headship, I was really committed to following that theme.

I think working in a through school is really special: one minute, you’re over in the Junior School doing an assembly - with 4 year olds hugging your legs at the end - and then the next thing you know, you’re talking to an 18 year old about her university applications and what she’s thinking about for the next stages of her life. So, you get such a rich, diverse experience as an educator - it’s a very special thing.

We also get the opportunity to think about themes that go all the way up, themes that can be relevant to a 4 year old and an 18 year old. But, also, we can consider how we can ensure our learning, and particularly our personal development, is really coherent. So, we’ll talk to our parents in Year 5 about device use and mobile phones using our experiences of Year 9 and Year 10. I think that offers something really special and really unique to those parents,

The Oratory Prep School, Oxfordshire Queen’s Gate School, Kensington

getting that constant consistency, those strands that run through. I was also really excited to be coming to a school that had such clear values. Both of my last schools have been faith schools, where values obviously absolutely sing through, and it’s wonderful to be in a school again where values are in the centre of who we are: kindness, courtesy and thinking of others. That was really important to me. So, I’m still slightly in the kind of “pinch myself” territory that I’m actually here and that I’m actually leading this school.

How do you feel that the experience you’ve had to date is going to help you with your insight and vision going forwards?

I’ve been at some varying schools in terms of academic intake. Here, we have a relatively broad intake, so it’s really interesting for me to think about the techniques and the approaches I saw at my last schools in terms of how we get the best for each girl. But it’s also interesting to think about how, in a broad intake, we make sure that every girl feels valued. For example, those girls for whom that ‘B’ was an absolutely epic achievement and we’re so excited for them, and with the pressure schools are under for academic results, how do we make sure they feel just as valued and celebrated as the girls who’ve got the ‘A’s and the ‘A*’s?

Can you tell us a little about the ethos and values at Queen’s Gate?

I think the first thing that’s really stood out is that we really are about the ‘individual’ here. You see it instantly from the fact that we don’t have a uniform—the girls can decide for themselves how they want to dress each day. They do have a dress code which is reasonably light-touch. It was a very new thing for me to come to a school without a uniform: when I first heard about it, I thought: “Oh, that’s a little bit bohemian compared to my background.” But I really love it! I love seeing their

“I think the first thing that’s really stood out is that we really are about the ‘individual’ here. You see it instantly from the fact that we don’t have a uniform—the girls can decide for themselves how they want to dress each day.”

little personalities come through in how they’re dressing, and I love that they can think about what they are comfortable in, what they feel confident in. I think it’s really good preparation for adult life, and we make those choices, particularly as women, all the time - we’re thinking about what the right fashion code or dress code is right now.

But that individuality, it also goes to things like the fact that we get to know our girls really well. Our size is perfect, we very quickly build up those really close, affectionate but professional interactions. It is something I’ve seen in other schools this size and was one of the things I really wanted to retain as I became Principal: that size, that contact, getting to know girls one-on-one, that chat you have with a girl as you walk from the Tube and she’s been on your train, getting to know about who she is and what her interests are.

Our individuality also goes into our academic provision. We are somewhat unusual in our GCSEs, in that we only do separate sciences (most schools these days complete the Double Award Science with a bit of all three, or you’re doing your Biology, Chemistry, and Physics). We let our girls pick two out of the three, and if they don’t want to do one of the three sciences at GCSE, then that’s fine and they can fit in another language, another humanity. They can really build their own individual portfolio. That was a latitude I benefited from at school - there was one science that I was quite happy to leave behind at the end of Year 9, and that gave me the chance to be more individual in the portfolio of subjects I took forward. We match that at A Level - we offer 28 different subjects and »

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build the timetable around the girls’ choices. We don’t have blocks. We get their choices in, we do this impossible sudoku, or somebody far cleverer than me gets to do that each year.

So, we really are about the individual girl, what’s best for her, what’s her potential, not thinking: “Here’s the mark that everybody’s got to meet, and if you’re not meeting it, you’re not good enough.” We’re also a very aspirational school, and I prefer the words “aspirational”, “ambitious”, because that links to that individuality. It’s: “What is your personal best?”, though I always borrow a phrase I heard used by the former Newnham College Director of Studies in Law, who, when told by somebody: “I did my best”, responded “You don’t know what your best is yet.” That’s something I’m really taking forward as I’ve joined, this idea that we’re aspirational, we’re aiming for the very top, but everybody’s “very top” will look different. Everyone’s top and dream is equally valid and worth celebrating and aiming for.

I think the thing that’s underpinning all of this is that we’re just a really happy place. There’s a real light-hearted camaraderie, we go up and down our stairs in our building—which are always a little bit taxing when you first get here, you don’t want to be on the bottom floor and realise you’re meant to be on the top, because that’s a long way! But the girls love it and really value it. It’s something they speak about when they’re talking about open day speeches and what their memories of the school will be once they finish. So, we’re just a really happy school. The girls meet you with a real genuine warmth; we’re a really good team as a staff, always backing each other up and looking after each other.

As I say to parents, I think that happiness is really important because happy girls are the most likely to overachieve, whether that’s academically or personally. Happy girls are the ones that put themselves out there and apply for that top university, they’ll go and do that audition for the part they think they’re not going to get, because they’re doing so from a place of safety and security, and they know they’ll be alright if it doesn’t work. Happy girls can throw themselves into their studies and will just thrive. So, we start from that point: “How can we make sure that the girls are happy? What do the girls need right now? How can we make something more fun?” I think that’s what

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really underpins our ethos here, and it makes it a really fun place to be!

Being in Kensington, you have a very diverse and international intake of students. How do you celebrate this as a school?

Although we have mostly English students, we have a significant group of girls who come from European, Chinese, Indian, or Middle-Eastern backgrounds; the list is endless. We really love the fact that it brings us lots of different mindsets, lots of different traditions, lots of different ways of doing things. Just the other week, we had some girls visiting and they were talking about applying for our Sixth Form, and they were talking about the difference between Saudi weddings and English weddings. Those conversations are then something that our girls learn from. In this day and age, I don’t see that our girls are ever going to be working in industries where they’re not going to be working with people from other countries, not going to be working in industries where they’re not going to be travelling overseas. We are a global citizenry, and I think what we’re giving our girls is some beautiful preparation, so they can be confident in that context, as well as respectful, sensitive and interested, and they can see that that diversity is something to be really proud of and enjoy.

Can you tell us a little about the different points of entry and requirements for children and families considering applying to Queen’s Gate?

Being a through school, we have multiple points of entry. One of our main points is 4+, which involves a very light-hearted assessment— parents come in, they meet with our Head of the Junior School, we meet their daughter. It’s really important for us to get to know the girls and for them to be visiting straight away, because that helps us get to know them really well.

We also have entries at 7+, which is a slightly different process. It consists of, again, interviews, and I believe we have one paper there, just to see how the girl is performing academically. We do want to, at that stage, make sure we feel comfortable that the girl is going to be able to thrive at our academic level - we are a broad academic intake, but it’s still important to us to know that they will be comfortable within our context, because all of our Junior School girls automatically get an offer to the Senior School. On the very rare occasion we do have somebody - maybe somebody who’s come through from 4+ - whose progress leads us to think that she’ll be better off somewhere else - and it really is about “I don’t know if you’re going to get as much out of us as you could at another school”, then we’re going to have that conversation. All of our girls in Year 5 and 6 will all get an automatic offer to join the Senior School. That’s something we’ve changed this year; it’s always been unofficial and we’ve now said, “Look, let’s just make this official.” We love our girls in the Junior School, they’re Queen’s Gate girls, we want to be keeping them through and maintain that consistency for them.

They will still take the 11+. We are a Consortium school with online assessments through Atom Learning. Our existing girls take that because that information is really helpful for us in terms of identifying where they’re at academically, and what help they’re going to need, what their sets are going to be in Year 7, so they can make a terrific start working in groups that proceed at the right pace for them.

For our 11+, we also have an interview, so all external and internal candidates will be interviewed. Though the offer is automatic for our internal students, we want them to have that experience because we know they find it really rewarding

Bursary provision

“We’ve just launched a new fundraising campaign called “Window to her future” linked to a beautiful stained-glass window we were gifted. We had its grand opening this week and we thought: “What a perfect metaphor for what bursaries offer.”

that they get their moment with me or one of my colleagues in the Senior School. We carry out the interviews in January and the assessment is taken in December. If they’re coming from outside, girls can either take it with us or at their primary school. We know lots of them will be more comfortable doing it in a place where they feel familiar, so that’s something we really support.

They then come and interview with us in January, and something I’ve been really clear about is that we will interview all girls. We don’t top-slice based on the assessment, they will all get an interview, and when we interview, we do so without exam results in front of us. The team interviewing the student will not have seen how they have performed academically. It’s really important to me that we’re not just thinking about academic aptitude, because there might be a girl who just had a bad day at the office. It’s one day in December, and maybe she felt nervous. These are little girls, they’re only 10 years old and we should really bear that in mind. But it might be that she’s not brilliant at Maths - maybe that’s not her strength - but when we get her in our interview room, whether it’s the way she talks about her friends or if we see a little bit of sass, or that little spark and we think: “Wow, you are going to be such a great leader!”, or, “You’re going to be the girl that, when there’s an upset in the class and there’s somebody who needs comfort and care, you’re going to be the first one on the scene looking after her, and your character is going to contribute as much to our school, probably more so than just the raw academic ability, actually.” So, that’s why we will interview without their results in front of us. I don’t want anyone to think “She’s lovely, but...”. I just want them to be coming out of the interview rooms going: “Oh my god, this girl, she’s gorgeous, the way she talked about her art - she’s just so interested, we have to take her” and not in any way be hesitant to take her in because of her academics. So, we’ll do that in January and give out our offers in line with the timings that we agree with all the other GSA schools.

We also have a small entry point at Sixth Form. Most of our girls choose to stay on from Upper 5 to Sixth Form, which is fabulous. We know that some schools have to slightly compete to retain students from Year 11. We are keeping the bulk of our girls, but we do have a small entry point there. Those girls come in - we had them in the other week, actually - and take a couple of papers in subjects they want to study at A Level, and again we will interview all of them. So, that’s our Sixth Form entry.

We do occasionally have places in other year groups, and there we do our own papers—Maths and English, usually. Again, those girls come in and have an interview with me and I get to know a bit more about them. So, if a family is looking for a place in Year 8 or 9, for example, it’s always worth giving us a call. So, we’d always encourage parents to get in touch if it’s between our main entry points.

How do children benefit from attending a Kensington school?

I think some of the advantages we’ve got are things like having museums on

Entrance requirements

our doorstep, which is an obvious one. We have girls going off and visiting different bits of the Natural History Museum as a weekly co-curricular club. How many schools can offer visits to these absolutely world-class, world-famous museums as a weekly club? That’s incredible!

Can you also tell us a little about the bursary provision that Queen’s Gate offers?

Absolutely. I am personally hugely committed to bursary provision, and also the fact that, as a school, we think about what the experience is like for our bursary girls. So, for example, if we’ve got a school trip, maybe a small European trip that’s a little bit more expensive, ensuring we’ve got that paid for by instalments, because that makes it more financially accessible. Or even regarding things like our sports kit, we’re not having names printed on the back because the minute you’ve got a name printed on a piece of kit, it can never go into a second-hand uniform shop, it can never be bought at a cheaper price by families that are going to need that facility to enjoy being here. It’s also desperately unsustainable, because it then has to go in the bin after the student no longer needs it.

So, I’m really committed to making sure that, not only do we offer the bursaries, but those girls have a fair experience while they are here. And that commitment is personal because I was a bursary girl myself, I went through private secondary school on a significant academic bursary. I know it changed my life - it always feels a little overblown and I’m not somebody who’s given to hyperbole in that way, but it did absolutely change my life. So, I know how important this is, and I know what this means for families. When my registrar calls up families in February and March to say: “You’ve got the bursary”, I know why the parents burst into tears on the phone, because they are so happy!

In terms of how we run our bursary provision, most of it is at 11+. It’s means-tested and we have all the details laid out nice and clearly on our website. Families complete that form, but they only do it once they’ve been offered a place - they don’t need to disclose any financial information until then. It is then reviewed annually. It is only right that we make sure that bursary money is going where it is needed most.

We do tell families to get their application forms in on time, because once I’ve allocated the bursaries provision each year - once the bursar and I have completed that process - we may not always have the money left to offer one to somebody applying late.

I hope one of the things I’ll be able to see whilst I’m here is continuing to increase our bursary provision. We’ve just launched a new fundraising campaign called “Window to her future” linked to a beautiful stained-glass window we were gifted. We had its grand opening this week and we thought: “What a perfect metaphor for what bursaries offer.” So, we have named our new campaign after that window, and we’re really looking forward to seeing how we can, hopefully, do some fundraising to increase what we’re able to offer to families who otherwise wouldn’t get all the wonderful benefits of what we can offer here.

We would like to thank the Principal of Queen’s Gate School, Miss Amy Wallace, for giving up her time to speak to us.

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www.queensgate.org.uk

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