Mr. Guy Sanderson

Mr. Gideon Hammond

FROM ELTHAM COLLEGE, SE LONDON

Mr. Guy Sanderson speaks about Eltham College’s history and some of the changes and challenges the school has addressed in the past ten years and Mr. Gideon Hammond speaks about how the college is addressing equality, diversity and inclusion and their recent ‘Every Name Matters’ initiative.

Can you tell us a little about the history and aims of Eltham College?

Guy: Thank you very much indeed for this chance to talk to you, it’s great to be here. Eltham College has been here in the corner of South East London for 180 years – we’ve just celebrated our anniversary this year, so it feels great to be talking about our heritage and what we’re doing this year.

We were set up as a school for the sons of missionaries, back in the Victorian day when missionaries went out across the globe, and you may have heard of some of our famous boys like Eric Liddell, who competed in the 1912 Olympics. We’ve changed a great deal since then: we’re much larger, more academically focused, we are now coeducational - whereas in Eric Liddell’s day we were an all-boys’ school - and we’ve moved just down the road from Blackheath to Mottingham, with a large set of playing fields behind the school.

You have been overseeing significant change to the school over the past few years – the school has grown and is turning fully coeducational. How is that going?

Guy: We’ve grown a little, we are probably at our optimal size now. I wanted to keep the school small and community-focused, so for us that means year groups of around 120 students. I don’t want to be in one of those schools where people get lost in the crowd, where it’s too big and people don’t know people’s names – that really matters, so we’ve grown a little bit, but we’re at that kind of size.

Co-ed has gone incredibly well; it’s been really well-received in the local area. After four years, the Junior School is now fully co-educational, 5050 in almost every year group, and in the Senior School, girls comprise at least a third of each year group, apart from the two that are still filling through and are still all-boys. In two years’ time, the school will be fully co-educational, with year groups that are roughly 50-50.

What’s been wonderful has been seeing that, as girls have joined different points of the school, it’s been encouraging seeing the way in which boys and girls have integrated so smoothly and seamlessly, the way the girls have risen to the standard the boys have achieved in the school already. For example, in sport, boys have consistently been local county champions in Kent in three different sports, and after just three years in co-education, the girls are already matching them in netball, which is not a bad achievement for a co-educational school after just three years, so we’ve been beating a lot of all-girls’ schools in Kent at one of their favourite sports. So, it’s gone really well, and obviously you’d expect from music, drama, academically, it’s been pretty smooth and seamless as well; we’re really delighted!

What do you feel are the opportunities and challenges facing independent schools in 2023 and beyond?

Guy: The opportunities are still exactly as they’ve always been, and that is to provide a great, rich education, pastorally, academically, co-curricular, but you won’t have to go far in reading a newspaper headline to see that the headwinds are strong. However, I think most independent schools are rising to the challenge, and we’re doing that in a way where most of us stay true to our roots. So for us, that means staying locally based in the

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by Marvyn Harrison

community and focusing on things like the work that Gideon is doing in terms of outreach and making sure that we serve the local community, rather than becoming a school that’s aloof and remote from everybody else.

You place great emphasis on ‘community’ at Eltham. Can you explain more about what this means at Eltham, the importance of working and engaging with the local community and some examples of the benefits it is bringing? Guy: Community matters to us; we look at it in two ways. One is the internal community, and what it means for students, staff and parents to be supporting and working with each other, and for that I’m really keen that Eltham College doesn’t become a trans-London school, where students are drawn from every corner of London. I still very much want to be a school that serves the local area, where students can get to know each other and families remain connected. I’ve got three children of my own, one of them was at a different school before we went co-ed, and having to drive half an hour outside of our normal area – so she was driving an hour everyday to get to school and back – and her friends were on the other side of London; it doesn’t work as a community. We stay true to the area we’re in, and that means that students go out and serve that community, so there’s a big outreach programme for Sixth Form students to go and serve in local care homes and schools and give back to the community that way. We’ve also started a big bursary programme, and that’s very much aimed at local students who can’t afford places at schools, and mindful of that, we’re trying to make sure that the school is welcoming to people of all differences, backgrounds, and Gideon’s work on that has been instrumental in making sure the school is fit for the 21st century.

Eltham College has a diverse intake of students – how do you celebrate this as a college?

Gideon: Eltham College indeed has a broad pupil body from many cultural and ethnic backgrounds, including Black, Asian, many parts of continental Europe and across the UK. With that said, we think it’s really important to embed relational discussions so that we can best get on with each other. This is from our wellbeing curriculum, led by Mrs. Nicola Bilsby, where we focus on Eltham College’s five R’s: respect, relationships, responsibility, resilience and readiness. The idea behind this is that if we can put those at the centre of what we do, then our actions are based on thought and reflection, which keeps us balanced for daily life and helps us engage with each other in a much more positive way. Of course, we also have our pastoral team, which we combine together to encourage students to be respectful to each other, to ensure that we’re fostering a society that is one of positivity.

We understand one of the key roles you are playing at the school is addressing issues around Equality and Diversity, Anti-racism and working with the school’s wider pastoral team. Can you tell us a little more about this work that is taking place?

Gideon: Certainly. I think, central to all that we do at Eltham College, we respect and understand that the pupils drive change, so the pupil voice is really important to us. We have a wide range of specific initiatives that include not only discussions from teachers to pupils in form time, but we have pupil leadership through our Pride Society, FemSoc, Afro-Caribbean Soc, Equality Committee - which is a broad committee for whole-school change - and we have the Changemakers society, and this is in addition to the work of our Wellbeing Programme.

The Afro-Caribbean Society is not just for pupils of Afro-Caribbean heritage – it focuses on discussions, issues and celebrations from that underrepresented group of society. The thing we’re certainly proudest of this year is our celebration of Black History Month, which was ‘Black History Two Weeks’ in our school because of half term. Over those two weeks, we had an amazing representation of culture, understanding and interest in AfroCaribbean values, heritage and lifestyle. We had a talk almost every day, I believe we had nine in total. We had Ansel Wong CBE come in, who was central to Black History Month in the UK, and we also had a food celebration in the second week, which was a hit amongst all the children, so that was really positive.

Our ‘Teaching Insight Programme’ is also something we are really proud of. It’s in its second year now, and it’s an opportunity for the school to attract more people into teaching, especially candidates from historically underrepresented groups, since as a school we recognise the importance of diversity of all types and the value it brings to the school, particularly in the rolemodelling for our pupils. So, it’s just pieces of the diversity and equality puzzle that Eltham College can help to solve and contribute to. We work closely with a number of organisations to reach out to the teachers, most notably ACEN, the Afro-Caribbean Education Network, and our marketing team also communicates about it on TES, through our own website, through LinkedIn, Twitter, any sort of outlet, we try to get it out there.

The ‘Halo Code’ is an external body. Their goal, and what they’re encouraging schools to do, is support students and staff in wearing their natural afro hair, which has previously been recognised as an issue for Black individuals in professional environments and schools. So, we’ve signed up to say that, at Eltham College, we are a school that recognises differences and celebrates them, even through the expression of hair.

You have introduced one particular measure – phonetic pronunciation of students’ names. Can you tell us more about that initiative and the difference it has made to students and staff?

Gideon: I think it’s best to start by answering this question with a quote from Dale Carnegie

Every Name Matters

in How to Win Friends and Influence People. He says: “Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” I think that imbues and encapsulates the sense of belonging we are trying to achieve at the school. Our ‘Every Name Matters’ initiative launched last year and was in response to results from the Flair Impact survey which we commissioned to understand sentiments of racial equity at the College. In discussions with pupils, we found that the name mispronunciation led to some students feeling insecure or even inferior. So, we formed a working group of teachers and support staff to design and implement a system to tackle this. We compiled a list of student names and their phonetic spellings which were then, rather fortuitously, retro-fitted to a module on our school’s information management system. To date, we have over 300 names on the register, at both the Junior and Senior Schools, so that when teachers mark the register they can pronounce each student’s name correctly, they have that prompt right there to change behaviours.

In addition to these phonetic spellings, we asked students to speak their own name into a voice recorder. The audio files are now exclusive to teachers, and are readily available on the staff intranet for easy access and limitless re-listens. So, instead of having our pupils constantly having to go into class, get their name mispronounced, and having to say “No, it’s X, not Y”, it’s now possible for staff to take some of that weight. The ‘Every Name Matters’ initiative is essentially a way of understanding and respecting people’s individuality through their name and celebrating that as much as possible, as well as taking some of the weight off children who had to continuously go through the process of correcting people. Proudly, it’s part of our admissions process now, so at the earliest engagement with the school, we are getting children’s names pronounced correctly, which has made a big difference.