18 minute read
Education Corner Podcast Interview
EDUCATION CORNER PODCAST
EDUCATION CORNER PODCAST INTERVIEW WITH HEAD
FROM ST DUNSTAN’S COLLEGE, LEWISHAM
Mr. Nick Hewlett
Mr. Nick Hewlett speaks about the ethos and St Dunstan’s, St Dunstan’s Diapason and the broad renaissance education that they offer children from many different socio-economic backgrounds. He also shares his thoughts about EDI and how to ensure that independent schools are able to continue to thrive going forwards…
Please explain to us the importance and relevance of the College motto ‘Albam Exorna’?
I feel really privileged to have this as our motto, it translates as ‘Adorn the White’. It’s very unusual and speaks to an ambitious and forward-thinking foundation in the late 19th Century. ‘Adorn the White’ is to do with the fact that we have a blank shield, which has one corner filled in with St Dunstan standing proudly in the corner. The reason for that was that the founders here at St Dunstan’s felt very strongly that education ought to be about allowing young people to find their own way to find their own way through school; to be true to who they are, to be individuals, to protect the individuality that is personified within them. We think that that is a really wonderful and radical thing of that time, and that it is just as relevant today as it was then. The whole principle around the school is that when you join the school we give you this blank canvas, we give you a huge array of different opportunities, and through that breadth of opportunity you are able to chart your own course, be true to who you are and to discover your true identity.
We want to encourage an open-minded and liberal culture and have a diverse school community that helps speak to that founding motto that underpins everything that we do.
Can you tell us a little about the ethos and values at St Dunstan’s College?
The ethos is demonstrated, I think, by that motto, which is central to the ethos that we have going on here. We are a very, very diverse school. We are in a very diverse part of south-east London, we have a very multicultural, multiracial, diverse socioeconomic intake of students, and with that comes a real vibrancy of difference and a celebration of difference and individuality that runs to the core of our identity as an institution. We are a
St Dunstan’s College
community of all faiths, and we are a community that cherishes that diversity, and cherishes that individuality. At its heart, we are a very liberal school, we are not forged from the conservative mould of independent education that I think does follow some of the other schools in this country.
We are very much a school where students can be comfortable with who they are. We are also a school that is true to that initial ambition in 1888, when we were a school that was radical for its day. We were founded as one of the first schools in the country to challenge the very conservative traditional curriculum that was rooted all around Literature, Religion and Classics. We were one of the first schools in the country, if not the world, to introduce Science and Technology. None of the other schools were doing it and it was an incredibly radical concept for its time. The incoming head of the governing body who appointed him was very keen on the idea of heuristic education, hands-on education. It’s not so much what a child knows that’s important, but how he/she finds out what they know. The ethos here is about challenging some of the educational norms of today. To give you a few examples of the things that we do, we have a few co-curricular programmes embedded into the timetable of the school. It’s not an add on, it’s timetabled, registered, monitored. It’s a whole programme structured around the values of the organisation. The pupils have to sign up to a whole range of different values. We have a talk period here called the ‘Stuart Programme’, which is all about life skills and the development of the Self. We discuss issues like toxic masculinity, toxic femininity. We teach them about resilience, conflict, deflection and other important practical life skills.
We have a huge emphasis on the Creative Arts here, we feel that creativity is being starved from the education sector in this country. We conclude with a two week festival, where we are off timetable for the last two weeks of the year, and we undertake creative activities for the sake of it. We also have a
really important adventurous activity programme that speaks to our value of courage and confidence. We don’t want young people to be arrogant, but we want them to be assured with who they are and to have the confidence to take on the vagaries of society when they leave the school. I suppose that, in summary, the overarching ethos of the school is one that values education and one that believes in an open mind in a liberal context. We want students to be themselves and to celebrate the diversity which they are a part of.
You have a very diverse intake of students from very different socio-economic backgrounds. What are your bursary provisions like?
We have an extensive bursary programme, we live in an area of London that is in huge need financially, and we don’t want to be that school on the hill with the gates shut. We do a lot of outreach work and partnership work, and we want children to be able to come to this school who would otherwise not have the means to do so. At the moment, we »
Renaissance education
give a significant amount of money every year to facilitating those families to be able to access this education, and it is a fundamental extension of our ethos and values that we were discussing earlier.
I have also heard a lot about the ‘St Dunstan’s Difference’, could you tell me a little more about that?
I think that as an independent school we are really different. The reason we won ‘Independent School of the Year’ last year was because we have been challenging the UK’s education sector, asking difficult questions, and being different. There are lots of ways in which we are different, I think. The biggest one of those would be a genuine belief that the sector has become too conservative, that it needs to modernise, and it needs to be made to fit the purpose of 2022 Britain. In order to do that, it needs to show that there is a place for private education in Britain. It is perfectly acceptable for hard-working parents to spend their money on their children through independent schools. Equally, it needs to be palatable for society and it needs to be an environment that’s rooted into the whole society that these institutions are designed to serve. We have to do everything in our power to stop these independent schools from being only for the select few and the privileged. We need to ensure that our independent schools are deeply connected with the roots of the communities where they were founded. The community partnership work that is intrinsic to our ethos as a school needs to be replicated across these other schools. Equally, the culture inside the school needs to be modernised across the sector. The idea of having a very monochrome staff, in particular, schools that haven’t really embraced the EDI in its context. I think that those schools have a long way to go to become palatable to the broader societal narrative. The days of a conveyorbelt independent schools’ education where you take your children into an independent school aged 11 and churn them out at 18, all looking the same and acting the same. I think those days are gone. We see it in government and we don’t want that anymore. We want youngsters to go through the independent education system, coming out as who they are, to be okay with that and to be individuals going into a globalised and multicultural world. I really do think that as a sector, we need to be challenging ourselves, challenging our own conservative historic thinking and need to modernise and develop in some of the ways that I have described.
As a magazine, obviously, equality, diversity and inclusion are our main focus. What challenges have you faced as the head of a leading London co-educational school?
It’s been a great adventure to be honest. I started here 9 years ago and we had a lot of work to do. It was a school that was great in many ways, its location is great, but it had lost its way a little, and it needed to re-found its identity here in South East London. That was a task, and a challenging task. Those first few years involved a lot of change. The school needed a clarity of identity that it was lacking. That was a real challenge. Coming out the other side of that, of course, we then went into Covid. That has been really, really difficult. For us it was doubly difficult because we had signed a twenty-five million pound estate project just as we were hearing about the virus in China. We’d signed up to an enormous project on site, a new STEM block, a new Sixth Form Centre, a new Junior
Inclusion and Diversity
School, a new Filming Arts Centre, a new Theatre, the whole lot. There was a great risk associated with that. When the pandemic came, we had to stick to the building schedule. We had the challenge of the logistics of an enormous site-build, the challenges of the pandemic, the challenges of the financials, the challenges of the unknown.
Navigating the school through that was really difficult. It took fantastic early decisions around early remote learning. We were one of the first schools in the area, just before lockdown, to shut down the school to train the teachers for remote learning on Teams, which was not very well known back then. We were able to do 100% remote learning from the very beginning. That was a really good decision and, in the end, we successfully made it through the pandemic. I also feel that the end of the pandemic has equally had its challenges too.
It was recently celebrated that you shared with students that you were in a same-sex marriage – what led to this decision and how do you feel it has benefitted and made a difference to the culture of the school?
The decision really came about from a realisation just how beneficial role models are for young people. I began to see it as we did our surveys around racial diversity of the school in particular. I thought that there is one area that I really can help in, if I’m really honest about who I am, and assisting youngsters in the LGBTQ+ community who might be struggling with their own identity, being able to say to them: “Look, it’s absolutely okay to be who you are.” I wanted to offer them my position as role model in that particular area, as it was free for me to give, and I felt that it would give tremendous benefit to the youngsters. In actual fact, the reactions of many of the youngsters was: “Who on earth cares?” But there were also lots of lovely messages and emails received, and I feel very grateful for that.
Amongst the younger generation, they couldn’t understand why it made it to the third page of The Times. They couldn’t understand why this would be big news. For me, it was really about role modelling. Going back to my earlier point, I think that the sector is very conservative, it does lack diversity, it is a problem for the independent education sector. The schools have a predominance of white heterosexual men. It is beginning to change and develop, with far more women coming into HMC Schools, which is an absolute breath of fresh air, I have to say. It is improving, but there is still a very, very long way to go until we can say that our leaders reflect the diverse society which we live in. That is why it came about, that is why I did what I did.
I thought it was brilliant. Can you explain the broad/renaissance education that St Dunstan’s College provides?
The school I went to is very well-known, it’s quite different now. When I went there in the 90s, their idea of success was very narrow. In particular, I think about my sporting career, or my non-sporting career. I wasn’t very good at rugby, and I knew that when I was eleven years old. If you weren’t very good at rugby, you were sort of done for in that kind of school culture. I felt really hard-done-by by that, I felt that by having a renaissance approach to the curricular programme, by having a real breadth of opportunity, it would have done me the world of good to have had a much healthier relationship with sport. That is just one example of why I thought that we ought to have a genderneutral approach to how we define excellence and achievement in sport and both co-curricular and »
curricular activities.
I have also been very ill at ease with this idea that we narrow down the academic subjects for children as a lever to try and engineer a few more percentage points on the league table. I think that that is totally wrong. I think that schools that are now starting to drop the creative arts at the end of Year 8 and 9. They put them on a carousel and they only do science or they drop classical civilisation. I think that we are doing an enormous disservice to these young people throughout their early adolescence. I have decided that throughout Year 7, 8 and 9, a time that is going to have a tremendous impact on who they become as adults, that they ought to have a huge renaissance curriculum and co-curricular programme. We have 17 standalone subjects, all the way through Years 7, 8 and 9. There is no dropping, they have to do all of it. It is an immersive, wonderful experience. On top of this we have our co-curricular programme, which has 300 plus activities. That whole programme is structured around our values. You can’t just come into St Dunstan’s and just play football all the time. You have to do something in the Creative Arts; you have to do something from the Youth Volunteering Service programme, you have to do something on the Physical Education programme, you have to do something across the whole range. As a school this ties into that open-minded philosophy about celebrating your individuality.
One of the greatest joys that I have is going up to the Performing Arts Centre and seeing boys who play football on a Saturday morning, doing ballet classes as a part of one of their co-curricular programmes, or singing and dancing in the school musical, and that not being a ‘THING’. Not being compartmentalised into being a certain type of kid. I think that that is one of the most damaging things that we do in education. Early on in adolescence, if we get school culture wrong. Young people start to think: “well, I’ve got to conform to thinking like this”, “I’ve got to start being like this”, “I have to “I have decided that throughout Year 7, 8 and 9, a time that is going to have a tremendous impact on who they become as adults, that they ought to have a huge renaissance curriculum and cocurricular programme.”
make that choice.” Wrong: you don’t have to make that choice, you can try both, and it’s absolutely if you create the right culture for young people. Otherwise, you get young people into psychological positions that are totally unhealthy.
In the last assembly I did on this I said to the students: “It is important to feel comfortable with who you are, as it is to know that it is totally okay to change your mind. It is perfectly fine to have feelings and thoughts about your identity, who you are and your sexuality, and to actually decide that that is not who I am anymore. It is important for that not to come with any sense of judgement from anyone else.” The same applies to the curriculum, the same applies to the co-curricular programme.
You mention in your welcome the ‘St Dunstan’s Diapason’. Can you tell us more about this?
I set this up to bring together students representing key protective characteristics from the Equality Act. Students who had a real key interest in furthering our celebration of diversity, and assuring cultural diversity within the school. We have five pillars: Religion, Belief, Sexual Identity, Sex and Gender, and Disability. Each of those leads has a staff lead as well. It’s about staff and children working together to develop an action plan for how we can celebrate our diversity and ensure equality
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within the school. This puts the decision-making back into the hands of the children. I was getting fed up with the idea of the ‘outraged young’, and the ‘outraged older generation’. I wanted to crack that by putting them all into a room together and saying: “Okay, we have got to own this together as one community, so what are we going to do?” We all believe in diversity, we all believe in equality, how are we going to be able to move this forwards together, from your perspective, from the teachers’ perspective and it’s been amazing! The ideas that they have come up with together have been incredible. I love all of the changes that they have made.
Could you give me an example of any? Are there any that have stood out to you?
There has been a lot of work around teaching of race and discrimination. We have learnt a lot about the language of race and hate. Teachers have been trained in how to handle that better. There has been a lot of work on problems in education. I didn’t even think of this, but the students raised the fact that the students in the Junior School could have different colouring pencils of different shades to shade in people. It hadn’t occurred to us that not having this was an important issue, which it is. We have now introduced this to the Junior School children. We have introduced a multiracial prayer room. We are now doing a partnership with a local educational-needs school who are helping us in terms of our inclusion policy, and we are helping them. So there are loads of great things that have been brought out of this.
What do you feel will be the challenges for independent schools going into 2022, 2023 and beyond?
Societal relevance is the big one for me. We need to ensure that we don’t become obsolete or dug into a trench of identity that doesn’t resonate with society as a whole. I think that that is a huge risk of the independent education sector. We also have the post-pandemic challenges that all schools have in terms of helping young people to adjust back to where we are today and the very real challenges for young people in the world at large, putting young people at ease with the world and at ease with themselves. My biggest one would be culture, and modernising culture in schools so that it is truly inclusive and diverse.
As a school you work closely with the local community and other Lewisham schools and
Looking to the future
beyond. Can you tell us more about the importance of working and engaging with the local community, and give some examples of this and the benefits that children/local communities are gaining?
Our school has recently just been put forward for an award for one of our latest projects which is the Lewisham Young Leaders Academy. We set this up with the Westside Young Leaders Academy to work with young black boys and girls from African and Afro-Caribbean heritage, whose life opportunities statistics, in comparison with white children, has a really stark contrast, and that’s not right. We have put an Academy on Saturday mornings where we work with these young people and a charity alongside us to correct that and to create a platform for learning and schools’ development that may otherwise not exist, and that is incredible. We have a committee called the Wren Committee - taken from the architect of the spire within which our foundation was conceived – a foundation based on ambition and benevolence that brings together all of our community work; the range of things that we do is absolutely vast. We really want to advance the life opportunities for the young lives in the Lewisham community.
We would like to thank the Head of St Dunstan’s College, Mr. Nick Hewlett, for giving up his time to speak to us.
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