Education Corner Podcast Interview

EDUCATION CORNER PODCAST

EDUCATION CORNER PODCAST INTERVIEW WITH HEAD

FROM THE ROYAL SCHOOL, SURREY

Mrs. Pippa Smithson

Mrs. Pippa Smithson speaks about their new Prep School building (which is on site with the Senior School), the advantages of being affiliated to the United Learning Group, preparing their children to be ‘future ready’ and how her role as an inspector for British Schools Overseas gives her a global appreciation of education.

Could you tell us a little bit about The Royal School, Pippa?

The Royal School, Haslemere is a co-educational school. We are an all-through school, from Reception right through to Upper Sixth. Currently we are on two sites, but we will be on one site next September 2023. We have boarding and day students. We can sleep up to about 90 boarders, and we offer flexi, weekly and full-term boarding, as well as day. We all really like that combination. We think that the day pupils benefit from the slightly longer day, the extraacademic support, the activities after school. We are only 30 minutes from Haslemere, straight into London, so it doesn’t take long to get into the action!

You currently have a project with the Prep School onto the same site as the Senior School by September 2023. Why have you decided to do this and what do you feel the benefits are going to be of having the whole school on site?

We are really looking forward to the whole school being on site, although we are an ‘all-through school’, being separate has meant that we have had to be incredibly organised to get the Prep and Senior School students together for things like leadership opportunities. In Year 7 everyone is quite excited to be in Senior School, but by Year 8 people can seem a little lost, so we think it is good to get the Prep School involved with them so that they have some leadership opportunities, making the transition from Prep School to Senior School smoother. We have also got people who teach in both sectors of the school. For example, our art specialist is very happy teaching across both of those sectors. From the perspective of the teaching, the expertise our Prep School gets is from teachers who teach in the Senior School up to A Level. These are two of the great gains that the school will get by becoming one. Stoatley Hall is a beautiful building, and I think that having a really inspiring surrounding makes all the difference to children’s learning. The fact that the building is slightly separate to the Senior School allows for easy collaboration, whilst also letting the Prep students feel that they are graduating into the Senior School when they move.

Can you tell me a little bit more about the

United Learning Group and what advantages you feel you get by being affiliated to them, as opposed to being a stand-alone school?

I was previously at another United Learning school, so I have been with the group now for 7 or 8 years. There are three main advantages; the first one being particularly relevant at the moment given energy costs and the costs of living and what we are bombarded by in the media every day, is that we actually can offer competitive fees. We have got the backing of one of the biggest multi-academy trusts, there are 74 academies in the group, and 13 independent schools in the group. We have got that stability and backing which allows for us to translate to our parents in the form of competitive fees.

One of the most exciting things about the group revolves around teaching and learning. Everyone shares ideas, that sharing of good practice is absolutely a key part of the group. As a head, for example, on Thursday this week I will be going to London with all the other heads in the group. We will have various people talking to us, various experts in the field. There will be over a hundred heads in there who I will be able to talk to. Equally, it is about the sharing of good practice with one another. That then filters down: all my heads of department go to meet with other heads of department every term and they share ideas.

The third part of United Learning is being able to have various ongoing projects. We are currently looking at doing a master plan of the whole site, with an eye to the future and potential investment.

Every school talks about preparing schools for the future. What does The Royal do that is different from other education providers?

I think that this is at our absolute core, it’s a part of our DNA, ensuring that children are ‘future ready’. It comes from my absolute belief that education shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. It is there to prepare children for the next stage. We do various things. Overall, we aim to prepare them practically, emotionally and intellectually for the next steps. How

The Royal School, Haslemere

we do this involves a seven pronged approach. We have written our own bespoke curriculum within the school that every pupil, from Reception right through to Upper Sixth, will do. To give you an example of what that will involve, if we are thinking about making sure that children are emotionally ready, our Sixth Form has just trained as Mental Health First Aiders. They then wear a little badge and walk around the school. They have now qualified as Mental Health First Aiders. Lower down within the school, we are getting children involved in something called a ‘Philosothon’. It is about intellectual curiosity, thinking on your feet, developing an argument, collaborating with others. At school we have a podcast, a studio and a TV studio. A lot of our Future Learn lessons go on in there. The great thing about that is that it’s all to do with growing children’s confidence and self-esteem. In many podcasts people have discussed how we are preparing children for jobs that do not exist yet. How do you do that?

This brings me onto the second part, which is around our rewards system, so our children are very proud to get ‘Future Ready’ points. These points are rewarded for certain behaviours that they show. These behaviours are behaviours that we know employers want to see in their employees. You may know that you might have a triple A* student at A Level, but do they show initiative? Are they able to collaborate well with others? Have they got a tendency to give up? I think that everyone listening to this who is an employer will think of someone they have employed, potentially fresh from university, who may not be particularly tenacious, or show initiative. It is about so much more than just the grades. These are the skills we really believe in, and we reward our children when they show those skills. They might not have gotten the answer right to the equation that they’re looking at, but they have tried it three different ways and have shown real tenacity. That skill of being tenacious is what is going to lead to success as well as getting excellent grades, which will open doors for them.

I have a slight bee in my bonnet about the fact that the system and curriculum hasn’t really changed in

“Stoatley Hall is a beautiful building, and I think that having a really inspiring surrounding makes all the difference to children’s learning.”

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Learning in the countryside

the last 30-odd years. We are still teaching the same content that we always did. The world that we are sending the children out into now has changed so dramatically. We need to keep that content that is a part of the national curriculum (GCSE and A Level), but we really need to think about how we teach that. We need to get these children learning how to think, not what to think.

As a school you have had a 77% growth in boarding since September 2021, which is really going against the national trend. Can you explain why so many local and international boarders are choosing to come to The Royal?

We are really pleased with this part of the school. I think that a major part of it came from having a really clear strategy of what we want. We wanted a really diverse boarding house. We didn’t just want one particular nationality to dominate the boarding house. A truly inclusive and diverse boarding house is one that has got people from various parts of the globe. Predominantly we have got some European children, some are short stay, some do longer stints staying here. We have got French, German and Spanish children with us. We have some children from China, Korea and London. We also have some local children who chose to board. I think that that creates a real atmosphere within the house. You get people from all sorts of different cultures and everyone gets on very well mainly due to our fantastic boarding house team.

Can you talk to us about university destinations at The Royal?

What we are most proud of is the diversity of the courses that the children go on to do. I think that that shows you how well we know the children. We have got children who will do very traditional degrees such as Law or English Literature or Maths, but we also have children who go on to do very specialist degrees like Statistics. There are also more vocational degrees such as Gaming Animation, Nursing, Fashion. Going off to the conservatoire of music. There isn’t a sort of ‘type’ that leaves The Royal. We know our students so well that we make sure that students aren’t going on to do something just because they think they’re quite good at it. Since they will dedicate at least three years of their lives to this, we want to make sure that it is the absolutely right thing for them to do. I remember the Chief Executive of UCAS giving a talk, and she spoke about children, particularly children from independent schools from a middle class background, ‘sleepwalking’ into university. I think that that is a major reason why so many children do actually drop out of university. None of the children at our school do drop out, which is due to the care and attention that they are given by us, so that we can make sure that they are doing the right course, not just the course that their parents want them to do. Over half of our children go to Russell Group universities, which is way above the national average. We are proud of both where they go and the diversity of courses that they study.

Finally, as an inspector for British Schools Overseas, are there any lessons that you feel we can learn from our international counterparts?

It is really interesting being an inspector because you get to do a real deep dive into another school. There are always ideas that you can come away with. I worked for a little while in Australia for about six years. One of the schools I worked in had something called ‘The Dalton Plan’, which was a very different system. The hours were less directed, and instead students had study periods. In a study period you would have different year groups working on different topics and different assignments. As a teacher, you managed that. The results were excellent. It is a really prestigious girls’ school in Sydney. It’s about asking how we are doing things, not just what we are doing. I think that changing things up is so important, and visiting schools abroad helps me to do that. I was at a school in Cyprus not so long ago and there they had a big project about building a car. The Royal School has now got two green power cars and have raced them at Goodwood. We got into the finals, and that is where inspiration comes: from going and visiting other places.

We would like to thank the Head, Mrs. Pippa Smithson, The Royal School, for giving up her time to speak to us.

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www.royal-school.org

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