Innovation & Collaborations
ONLINE MAGAZINE FOR THE OLD NORTH LONDONERS’ ASSOCIATION AI generated image
26 | 2023
ISSUE
A message from the Head
As I write this, we have just celebrated Founder’s Day; I hope you were able to join us for the live-streamed Service.
The theme for this year was ‘Giving Back’. From the very earliest of days, NLCS students were encouraged to have an outward focus and consider the needs of others. Giving back and charity work have always been central to the ethos of NLCS, so in the lead up to this year’s Founder’s Day we held our first ever Giving Day, raising £178,979 for our Bursary Fund and IDEAS Hub capital campaign. Thank you so much to those of you who have donated and supported us in our fundraising efforts, we are incredibly grateful for your support.
Through bursary provision, we offer young people the opportunity to thrive at NLCS. Ensuring that girls with the ambition and potential to succeed have access to a North London education remains one of our biggest strategic priorities.
However, as we face a rapidly evolving workforce, with new careers and fields of study taking shape, our physical spaces must support a curriculum designed to nurture both the technical and critical thinking skills
The Development Team supports North London’s growing alumnae network and fundraises for much-needed bursaries and developments at the School. Over the past year, we have welcomed three new team members. Tara Stephens joined in March 2022 as the Development Office Administrator, Samuel Farrer joined in October 2022 as the Alumnae Engagement & Events Officer, and finally, Joe Dunster joined in December 2022 as the Fundraising Manager.
We always enjoy meeting you and receiving updates and news, so please do keep in touch. We currently have contact details for over 7,000 ONLs across the world, but some of these may no longer be accurate. If you know anyone that isn’t in touch with the School, please do ask them to email us at onla@nlcs.org.uk.
We are delighted to introduce this year’s ONLine magazine with the theme, ‘Innovation and Collaborations’.
that employers will demand over the coming years. The IDEAS Hub represents an ambitious new vision that will dramatically enrich the education we can offer to both our students and the local community. Students will experience the value of collaborative, cross disciplinary work, and the power of a diverse group of people working together. They will develop the skills companies are seeking: collaboration, creativity, flexible learning, critical thinking, and effective communication among many others.
At Canons, we want to encourage our students to see themselves as the leaders of tomorrow. We are very grateful to those ONLs who take time to help our students and each other, whether through offers of work experience or career advice in order to widen their horizons and be aware of the opportunities for their future working lives.
Finally, my thanks to ONLs across the world, for being a constant inspiration. We want to develop in our students the skills, ambition, and confidence that you have shown, to follow their own path in life and make the choices that are right for them. Everyone at Canons is conscious of the powerful role models in previous generations, whose stories inspire today’s students to aim high and make a difference to the world in which we live.
I hope many of you will come to visit Canons, either on an individual visit or to one of the year group reunions planned for 2023. You will be very welcome.
With warmest wishes,
Dr Hazel Bagworth-Mann
The articles are inspiring with writers from different industries and sectors. Read as some of these people make an industry-changing decision and pave the way for a new sustainable, innovative, and efficient future.
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LONDONERS’ ASSOCIATION
Celebrating our collaborators
Enriching knowledge with ONL expertise and experience
At NLCS, we are fortunate and grateful to have a huge breadth of experience to draw upon, thanks to our ever-increasing volunteer community. During 2021/22 we saw a 45% increase of support, recording 144 ONLs, of all generations, who stepped forward as speakers, mock interviewers, mentors and more. Together, we are not only improving the education and aspirations of current students but also the wider community, including our local state school partners and young ONLs.
Thank you to our ONL donors!
Last year the number of ONLs giving back increased dramatically, with participation growing by 57% on the previous academic year.
Reconnecting after the lockdown
After a long hiatus, we ramped up our in-person events to ensure all those who missed out due to the pandemic were able to celebrate their year group reunions. In the academic year 2021/22, we welcomed back 760 ONLs and former staff for reunions and other networking events. Thank you for coming and sharing your memories.
Lucky to have you…
A big thank you to some incredibly special volunteers… our ONLA Committee, particularly Jane Cole (Class of 1972) and Julie Alberg (Class of 1985) who helped us produce the ONLine magazine and assisted the team at countless events.
ONLINE - ISSUE 26 – 2023 // 3 POSTAL ADDRESS North London Collegiate School, Development and Alumnae Office, Canons Drive, Edgware, HA8 7RJ https://www.nlcs.org.uk EMAIL onla@nlcs.org.uk TELEPHONE 020 4524 9494 PLEASE CONTACT US
EDITORIAL TEAM
Samuel Farrer, Alumnae Engagement & Events Officer
Class of 2009
Innovation and Collaborations Rosa Jung
All NLCS students, from the moment they step into School, are taught about the value of teamwork. Even First School girls, aged four, are now taught to collaborate with the assistance of Clara, Collaborative Cow, who is one of a series of learning habits. Working, studying, and playing alone is great, but doing it with others is greater. This carries through into after school clubs, lessons, music, drama and of course sport across the whole school.
“Cognitive diversity (diversity of thought, values, and personalities) on a team resulted in 20% more innovation than their noncognitively diverse peer teams”Deloitte, 2018.
By instilling this in us from a young age, NLCS is setting us up to learn how to maximise our potential, personally, professionally and beyond.
Lacrosse games were fun and especially satisfying as we helped each other to improve our skills and win our games. Solo tennis matches were an opportunity for reflection as we learnt to console ourselves or the opponent, whoever won or lost. Orchestra taught me to match the breathing of my fellow string players, as we synchronised the strokes of our bows to the direction of the conductor. NLCS gave me the variety of choice to learn, unwittingly, how to collaborate and be part of a team.
Fast forward to university and masters - it is more of the same, at a higher level. Another few more years
into my professional career, the ability to innovate and collaborate matures.
In writing this short piece, I would like to expand on why collaboration and innovation is key in focusing on the role I hold at Antler.
ANTLER
Antler (www.antler.co) is a global venture capital firm enabling and investing in the world’s most exceptional people building the defining companies of tomorrow, located in 24 start-up ecosystems across six continents. To date, Antler has invested in more than 370 companies in over 30 industries. The entrepreneurs Antler works with are the top 1% globally, selected out of more than 60,000 entrepreneurs evaluated every year.
My role as Senior Program Manager of Benelux, is running nine week residencies in Amsterdam, whereby 60 founders from more than 20 nationalities, with on average 10+ years of experience, join in hopes to find a co-founder, ideate on a problem to solve, validate the solution and ultimately, pitch to us for a chance to raise €100k in return for 12% equity.
From Day 1 of the residency, 60 founders are working in groups, finding innovative ideas over design sprints in different industries. Collaboration is at its highest - there is no “bad” idea, where all outputs are encouraged, taking each one through a methodological way for founders to end up choosing one solution to pursue.
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Having run five residencies (most recently helping launch Iberia’s first cohort, hybrid between Madrid and Lisbon), here are my four main takeaways:
1. Creativity comes in all shapes and sizes: it is the incremental and creative solutions that pave the way to greater change. Start small, dream big.
2. Teamwork enhances individuals’ output disproportionately: should one person equal one, in working as a team, 1+1=3. It should maximise and yield more results than two people’s output.
3. Diversity in a team guarantees faster success: there is a limit to one’s scope of thinking and experience, if they pair up with someone similar to them. But should the team be diverse, from the starting point, the ability to bounce different aspects magnifies significantly.
4. Innovation is fast, iterative and abrupt but unless you stay agile and react accordingly, the solution one’s built today may be obsolete tomorrow. Be prepared, be proactive and the rest will follow.
I would like to support the above takeaways with an example - one of the first investments we made during my time at Antler.
Pal (https://www.palhelps.com/)
“We’re building Pal to support families affected by advanced or life-limiting illnesses: whether you are receiving care yourself, or caring
for a loved one. We understand the difficulties of receiving or delivering care in a resource-constrained space, which has been traditionally neglected by technology. We’ve set out to transform this space, and we’re starting here. With this app, one functionality, and you.”
The two co-founders, both female, come from different backgroundsone Iranian, the other Norwegian. Religion (or lack of), as well as upbringing have influenced their lives, but when they joined the Antler residency, it was with the hope to start a meaningful company.
The startup is based on Nara’s personal experience in going through the loss of her mum through cancer. The months she and her family shuffled between the hospital and their home, the endless appointments, medications and tests they had to support, she realised the difficulty in keeping track, and lack of information sharing between the stakeholders made the process much harder than it could have been. Hence Pal was born.
Her cofounder, Azi has been instrumental in visualising the solution, making it come alive as a product, framing the problem, solution and team in a way that makes Nara/Azi the inevitable combo to build Pal.
So how does their story support my takeaways? Whilst Nara brought the idea to the table, Azi’s different background of experience brought an edge to the solution that was pivotal to Pal’s success - ability to
monetise in a scalable way. Since forming a team, their product has pivoted numerous times, changing to the market needs, validation research molding the features that will be the first to be built. It’s been a delight working with them, seeing their growth and trajectory for the year.
Last words
For those of you reading this article, whether you are a school or uni student, on a gap year, just starting your career, or have been on the career bandwagon for decades or maybe even retired - I am certain you will agree with me about the many benefits of working in a team. The results are better and ultimately, it’s more fun. Innovation and collaboration knows no boundaries, no matter what sector we are intogether, we are truly more powerful than alone.
We have NLCS to thank for shaping us in this way, but it is now up to us to spread our learning and utilise our skills to excel on our journeys ahead. Let’s go live to the fullest!
Please reach out to me if you would like to have a further chat on any of the points discussed:
jungrosa@gmail.com.
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Emma Levy Class of 2002
Up until March 2020, my career was going exactly according to plan. For the previous several years I had been a physiotherapist for the English Institute of Sport, working with elite, Olympic athletes across different sports. In addition, just six months prior, I had fulfilled one of my lifelong ambitions by starting up my own private physio practice, Elevate Physio & Performance, and it was thriving. But then, life threw some obstacles (or lemons, as we’ll see later) at me. First, Covid, which affected all of us meant that I had to close my private practice as it had not been in existence long enough to receive government support.
Then, in May 2020, the unimaginable happened and I was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of just 36. I underwent a double mastectomy with reconstruction, three gruelling months of chemotherapy, 15 sessions of radiotherapy and a further six months of antibody infusions.
And with that life-changing event, came a bit of a reset in my professional life. That lifechanging event led me to rethink my professional life. The drive that I’d had for my private practice, before covid and then cancer, had not been rekindled. So, for now at least, I said goodbye to Elevate and focused on my work with the GB Olympic diving team, which I love.
The cancer diagnosis also challenged my personal ambitions. I set myself a goal in my very first session of chemotherapy of completing my first Olympic-distance Triathlon as soon as I was physically able to do so (which I did - 11 months following major surgery and only one month following completion of all active cancer treatment – one of the proudest moments of my life).
But, more than that, the number
of hours in solitude during chemotherapy and post-surgery had lit another flame. I had become an ardent fan of podcasts, being consistently inspired by an array of different guests on various podcasts - I found them to be a great tool for self-development.
In addition, as I had such a wealth of support during my treatment, even in the midst of lockdown, from friends, charities and even strangers, I wanted to give something back to the cancer community, so I started a “Big C” running club for people who had been touched by cancer. I had been very private during my illness, but now that I was recovered, I found that I wanted to share my experiences in the hope that it could help others who were going through similar things. Through the running club I met some inspiring individuals, and I was relishing learning new things about myself and the other members of the club.
These two passions merged and one day I recognised that I wanted to put my experiences out there in the public sphere. I had always loved public speaking and before choosing physiotherapy to study at university, I had been weighing up between broadcasting and physio. In fact, whilst at NLCS, my ambition had been to one day be a Blue Peter presenter! I also clearly remember Mrs Kendler telling me that I should seek a career in radio. As usual, I didn’t listen to my teachers and I chose physiotherapy, which has been an extremely fulfilling career up to now.
I realised that I wanted to start my own podcast. During my treatment, I questioned whether it was my positive mindset or maybe something deeper, which enabled me to bounce back and to train and compete in the triathlon. And having worked with elite athletes for most of my career, it’s always intrigued
me that a significant number of high performing individuals have encountered some form of adversity earlier in their lifetime. So the premise of the podcast would be to meet and interview a variety of high performing individuals, across the sporting, cultural and corporate world and beyond who have experienced adversity but who have come back stronger.
I had the seed of an idea, but like everything else in life, one of the most difficult parts of starting something new is the transition from ideation to actually making it happen. Luckily, I’ve always been a determined person with a great support network and once I have an idea, there is no going back. So, for the past eight months I have been planning the production of my new podcast ‘When Life Gives you Lemons’, which was launched in February 2023. So far, I have interviewed, amongst others, Olympic and Paralympic gold medallists, actors, authors, TV personalities and entrepreneurs, with more to come over the next few weeks and months.
The aim is to delve into their stories from trauma to growth and attempt to understand how some individuals are able to use adversity to their advantage. My hope is that by collaborating with these individuals and sharing and exploring their stories we can help others deal with adversity and inspire them to do great things.
So, please check out ‘When Life Gives you Lemons’ on all your usual podcast platforms and I would always welcome some feedback from ONLs so please do get in touch.
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The Multiverse
Carly Becker Class of 2006
Multiverse is an edtech company on a mission to create a diverse group of future leaders by building an alternative to university and corporate training through tech apprenticeships. It is one of the UK’s most successful startups, having recently reached ‘unicorn’ status and been named on Fast Company’s global list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies. Carly Becker (Class of 2006) is Multiverse’s VP Customer Success, where she leads the business’ partnership with companies such as Morgan Stanley, Sky and the NHS to drive the demonstrable impact of apprentices on digital transformation, closing skills gaps and reaching a more diverse population.
The existing education system is not producing people with the technical skills they need to succeed in a digital career - as proven by the huge number of vacancies for these roles. Europe has a shortage of five million software engineers and in the UK alone the Government claims there are 100,000 unfilled positions in data. Continued automation means that skills shortages also won’t stop for those that are currently employed: 85% of the jobs that will exist by 2030 haven’t been invented yet. Everyone is going to need an element of retraining in the digital revolution.
To solve this crisis transforming our approach to education is essential. At Multiverse, we believe that apprenticeships in tech have a huge role to play in both future-proofing the economy and driving equity in the workplace. We know that talented people are everywhere, but opportunity is not. Mutilverse provides apprenticeships to young adults and those looking to reskill;
12-15 month programmes that train individuals in in-demand skills such as software engineering, digital marketing, and data analytics. Apprentices pay nothing for their training and earn a salary while they learn. They benefit from personalised coaching, applied learning, and a community of social, networking and leadership opportunities.
Apprenticeships are brilliant for people starting their careers. Apprentices like Fatima, who left the care system and is now a software developer apprentice at one of the UK’s leading fashion brands. She passed on university and the huge amount of debt that comes with it, instead earning a great salary whilst developing skills that will benefit her for life. By removing the blockers that university places, apprenticeships have enabled a diverse cohort of individuals to enter exciting new fields at top employers. At Multiverse, 40% of the apprentices we place have claimed free school meals, more than half are from minority ethnic backgrounds, and 57% are women. In comparison, only 3.4% of those claiming free school meals make it to a top tariff university.
What’s just as important is what apprenticeship can do for those whose roles are at risk from automation. Helping warehouse workers, for example, develop the digital skills to take charge of the data affecting their industries is a win for both the individuals and the companies they work for. Even if we
can’t predict what jobs will look like in the future, we know what we can do is prepare individuals and give them the career resilience to flex when it comes. That means providing repeated opportunities for upskilling, education you can return to, and a focus on core skills like data analysis or project management, that are applicable across multiple career tracks. One of the things that’s so broken about the existing education system is the assumption that a three year undergraduate degree is enough training to support a multi-decade career. We can confidently predict technological redundancy will be a bigger part of the conversation, and with it, the steps we need to give people career resilience.
So next time you think of an apprentice, don’t limit yourself to a young person in a hard hat: there is a huge amount of opportunity for people at all stages of their career to benefit from applied learning and digital skills, and to make the boardrooms of the future more diverse in the process.
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The Future of the Workplace
Ola Elkhatib Teacher at NLCS Dubai
Why Shouldn’t People Worry about AI Taking Over?
In 2017, studies were wondering if educational institutes would be ready to replace educators with robots, in less than a decade! That would have been about three to four years from the date of writing this article in 2023 (Bodkin, 2017; Global Educational Series, 2017).
Although it seemed a bit extreme back then, researchers were able to bring up strong points to justify their robotic futuristic vision. Their justification hovered around robots’ efficient performance with less possibility of mistakes, in addition to the cost-effectiveness the replacement of teachers with robots would bring, with no sick leave or even paid holidays needed. Furthermore, it was argued that even teachers like robots and that they use technology in the classroom to enhance students’ learning (Bodkin, 2017; Global Educational Series, 2017).
No matter how powerful and convincing the idea of replacing humans with robots may or may have not seemed, the opponent was intense. Researchers expressed their worry about generations’ ability to succeed in the absence of the human element, using data from previous years’ meta-analysis studies. The data showed that over 62% of people who lose their jobs in the US lack communication skills (About.com, 2014, cited in Eisenhauer, 2015). They argued that human interaction and social influence are key to humans’ evolution and survival
(Bodkin, 2017; Global Educational Series, 2017).
Korteling’s et al. (2021, p.9) study revealed that “No matter how intelligent autonomous AI agents become in certain respects, at least for the foreseeable future, they will remain unconscious machines”.
How Will Workplaces Look in The Future?
This question brings the same takeaway from 2017, if survival and evolution happened with the involvement of human interaction and social influence, then history will be repeating itself. What many people seem to not get is that those elements of human interaction and social influence are the core of leadership (Bass, 1974, cited in Bass, 2009).
Camp (2022) argues that looking into companies’ or Organisations’ data from the past, analysing it, and responding to its interpretations with strategic plans, is so far from the reality of leadership. On the contrary,
he considered this as management. Furthermore, he argued that true leaders are those who look through the future instead of the past.
In fact, the new version of GPT4, which will be launched before the end of March 2023, will be multimodal. This means that it will be able to interpret data from images as well as from texts and generate results in the form of texts, images, and videos. Furthermore, the language settings will be made multilingual, where the input and output
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data can be in different languages (Byrne, 2023).
Combining Camp’s (2022) view of management versus leadership, with Byrne’s (2023) GPT-4 scoop shows that management roles are soon to be held by AI, whereas Korteling et al. (2021) considered perceiving Artificial Intelligence as a fundamental component of the workplace in the future, suggesting that the collaboration will be the solution. In their collaboration vision, employees will not only collaborate with each other but also with AI.
What Do We Expect?
The upcoming era will bring many changes that we should be ready for. Below are some of these:
• More Powerful Employees
Buren &Greenwood (2008) emphasised that workplace policies must be reformed, acknowledging the imbalanced distribution of power between employers and employees. They also argued that employees’ voice is equally essential as employers’ voice, not only for their well-being and engagement but also for the business to success.
The focus will be on collaboration. When people collaborate, they
equally share ideas and work on them. Those who find it hard to work with teams must enhance their social skills (Camp, 2022).
Butler, Tregaskis & Glover (2013) suggested a partnership model between employers and employees, where communication was not conducted through a hierarchical approach, but rather a matrix-based one, where management shared all work-related information, employees in return trusted them, and they all cooperated horizontally instead of vertically to make decisions. The results were positive in both areas, employee satisfaction, and business outcomes.
• The Coach Leader Leaders will have a well-being and mental health responsibility towards their employees (Morgan, 2023). If people were used to working alone regardless of how they feel, the collaboration will require a certain degree of psychological safety and well-being (Camp, 2022).
• The Accountable Employee Research has proven employees’ accountability to enhance their engagement, job satisfaction, performance, organisational citizenship behaviour, and organisational behaviour (Han & Perry, 2020).
Great performance will not be perceived as an end goal, but rather as life-long learning. Humans are too complex in comparison to AI,
and they like to be held responsible and accountable. This means that leaders will eventually have to stop judging their employees’ performance. Alternatively, they will be expected to coach them and collaborate with them, to help them gain the necessary awareness and set their own actions, aiming toward continuous learning and improvement (William, 2023).
• From an employee to a business owner – Employee Shareholder Activism
Corporates in Germany have started to implement a business model, where employees and managers get a chance to become potential shareholders, aiming for distributional equity both financially and politically (van der Zwan, 2013). In the future, more corporations should embrace such initiatives on a global level.
How Do We Get There?
Perhaps you are now thinking of booking a meeting with your manager to ask for shared equity, hold on! The only way to make such changes happen is through one key, which the article started with and will end with, it is leadership. Leadership is influence, collaboration, attentive listening, asking powerful questions, and fairly distributed roles. Are you demonstrating these yet? Not too late to make improvements!
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Lifelong learning
If Old North Londoners and current NLCS students are united by any one common thread, it is a love of learning. Whatever you studied at Canons, it is most unlikely that you were an indifferent learner. Luckily, a motivation to learn new skills, to understand and deepen knowledge is perhaps our most useful asset as we prepare for the future of the workplace.
Opportunities to learn
In a constantly shifting employment landscape, lifelong learning is not just an option, it is essential. We need to acquire new know-how both to fill emerging job roles and to ensure long and fulfilling careers.
Through my work at Aptem, a Software as a Service business that works with training providers, universities, colleges and employability organisations, I help to deliver and administer learning for over 100,000 people across the UK.
Nowadays it is apprenticeships that offer a particularly effective and practical way to encourage and support lifelong learning. Learners can simultaneously study, earn and gain valuable experience. They are also available at all levels of learning. If you are not familiar with today’s opportunities, you might think of hairdressing and construction work but you can also take a degree apprenticeship and popular subjects include data science, coding and management training.
As futurist Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock, said: “The illiterate of the future are not those who can’t
read or write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
To thrive in today’s uncertain world, we all need to be open to learning, unlearning and relearning. To do this, it is important to develop a sense of self-direction. Two central factors help here: metacognitive awareness and a positive attitude towards lifelong learning.
Metacognitive awareness is being aware of how you think and learn. It lets you to be more mindful of what and how you are learning. You can see how the same knowledge or approach may be applied in other situations.
At the same time, your positive attitude is closely tied to what inspires you. You can strengthen it by recognising an end goal, one that matters to you and can provide both motivation and a sense of responsibility to push yourself towards it. This gives you a level of autonomy and accountability over your progress, an approach that you can repeat in the future.
Today’s apprenticeships are designed to develop of these two attributes.
As the aim of an apprenticeship is to enable you to progress whilst in a permanent job role, motivation is intrinsically built into the model. Earning while you learn is another tangible motivator, as is giving apprentices the satisfaction that comes from being rewarded from working hard. Apprentices can also typically see their learning being
rewarded by progressing into a higher-paid position at the end of their apprenticeship. And having to manage learning alongside working gives apprentices a degree of autonomy and responsibility for their own success.
Just like our NLCS education, quality apprenticeships are expansive and develop the whole person, not just job-specific skills. Apprentices are taken on a journey from limited skills to becoming an expert. They gain a sense of curiosity, discovery and self-improvement, all of which nurture a positive outlook towards lifelong learning.
Too old to learn?
Before I came to Aptem, I was under the impression that apprenticeships are only for young people, but I am glad to share that there is no upper age limit for undertaking one. Anyone over the age of 16 and not in full-time education is eligible to become an apprentice.
There is a historic association of apprenticeships with young people of school-leaving age. However, there is plenty of evidence to show that they can also be beneficial for people throughout their working life. Apprenticeships could be revisited over the course of a career as a way to transition roles.
Recognising this, Barclays has established a Lifelong Learning Apprenticeship to “help adults seeking employment after a period out of work and to create a pipeline of older recruits to build a workforce demographic that is diverse and
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Julie Alberg (née Mills) Class of 1985
reflects the make-up of Barclays’ customer base.” The programme targets anyone over the age of 24 who has been out of work for 12 months or more. They require no prior experience in banking. After a three-week pre-employment course, successful candidates go on to complete a 12- to 18-month apprenticeship delivering financial services in-branch or over the phone. From there, apprentices are able to gain banking qualifications through the Chartered Banker Institute and progress to more senior roles.
The Barclays programme has been running since 2015. It has been a very successful model to support adults, particularly the longer-term unemployed, back into employment.
Making the system more flexible
The Lifetime Skills Guarantee was launched by the UK Government in September 2020. It is an attempt to provide adults with skills that are valued by employers and the chance to study flexibly, in a time and place that suits them. The Prime Minister promised reforms include a commitment to increasing apprenticeship opportunities. It aims to make the apprenticeship structure more flexible and increase funding for SMEs taking on apprentices.
Sarah Kirby, Group Head of Organisation Design & HR Strategy at Zurich Insurance Company Ltd, commented that this goes some way to solving a key challenge with the Apprenticeship Levy: “The main hurdle with the Levy in the UK is
that the criteria are too narrow and onerous, which addresses only a skills gap in one’s current role. In the context of the Future of Work, we should be thinking beyond school leavers and considering people at all stages of their careers.”
Apprenticeships represent collaboration between formal learning providers and businesses. Unlike other forms of learning, an apprentice is in paid employment and is being paid throughout the learning process. This makes apprenticeships the most sensible way to support people to change careers or move out of unemployment. These are two challenges facing the country as we move beyond coronavirus and navigate the fourth industrial revolution - a new era that builds and extends the impact of digitisation in new and unanticipated ways.
What’s more, five years after completion, the average Higher Technical Apprentice earns more than the average graduate. This is one of the motivations for the government’s move to facilitating lifelong learning: apprenticeships offer opportunities that are obscured by the false dichotomy in public imagination between the idea of “practical” versus “academic” education.
Apprenticeships and the fourth industrial revolution
Traditional education cannot adapt fast enough to equip students with
the knowledge, skills and experience they need to operate newly emerging technologies and fulfil emerging business needs. Apprenticeships can.
Reskilling through apprenticeships is a way to fill the skills gaps that will occur in the near and longer-term future. This includes those gaps that we may not yet have predicted or are not yet capable of preparing for.
The jobs landscape will continue to change as technology advances. The apprenticeship model offers a strong structure to establish collaboration between employers and learning providers to ensure that these gaps continue to be addressed. What’s more, apprenticeships can also ensure that workers of all ages and at all stages in their careers have an opportunity to transition into emerging fields of work, without taking on the huge risk and financial burden of retraining at a university.
So, if you are motivated to study for a more senior role or explore a new career path, it might be worth considering how an apprenticeship could help support your own lifelong learning.
Julie Alberg is a director at Aptem Ltd. Founded in 2009, the company produces innovative technology products that support the delivery of complex, regulated skills and employability programmes. Aptem’s technology enables organisations to deliver programmes that help people find rewarding work and equip themselves with the skills they need to progress.
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Who Gives A Crap
“Please could you send me that photo of Simon on the toilet?” is not a message you expect to send about your boss in the first week of a new job. And yet, is the position I found myself in whilst preparing a presentation just over a year ago when I joined Who Gives A Crap to run the UK and European business.
Who Gives a Crap is an eco-friendly toilet paper company. We also donate 50% of our profits to fund clean water and sanitation projects. Ten years ago, to crowdfund investment for the first production, Simon (one of the founders & CEO) decided to livestream sitting on a toilet for as long as it took to raise $50k. A painful 50 hours later, that first production run was born.
Today ,Who Gives a Crap has over 1m customers, is available in Australia, US, UK and Europe, and has donated over £6.5m. We sell other products like kitchen rolls and tissues and have just launched a
sister body care brand called Good Time. But, our heartland is toilet paper.
I confess: I am not passionate about toilet paper. Ironically, I even remember giving a talk at a NLCS careers fair a few years ago where I talked about only wanting to work in brands and industries that felt innovative, culturally relevant and exciting - and explicitly called out toilet paper as the type of industry I’d never work in. I guess the universe has a funny way of laughing at us.
It turns out, it’s actually because toilet paper is ostensibly such a boring product and category that makes it so exciting. If you can
create a disruptive brand about something so…blurgh, whilst tangibly addressing one of the most unnecessary drivers of deforestation (over 1 million trees are cut down every day to make toilet paper - a stat that totally blew my mind when I learnt it) AND have a business model that can truly make a positive difference to society, then I figured I’d probably be surrounded by some pretty awesome people able to do awesome things if I joined.
Words like disruption and innovation often get bandied around - especially in the land of start-ups and entrepreneurs. Yes, I’m biased now that I live in a world where
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Emily Kraftman Class of 2006
toilet humour at the start of Zoom calls is the norm, but Who Gives a Crap has genuinely done things differently from the start.
It’s in the big - having our core ‘BHAG’ (big hairy audacious goal) being about eradicating toilet poverty - providing clean water and sanitation to all. This isn’t lip service, it’s why we exist - and fundamentally is built on a belief that business, entrepreneurship and capitalism can be used to do good. In 2021, we took investment for the first time, to accelerate our growth in order to drive us towards being able to make an even larger impact. This in itself is significantventure capitalists investing in a business that gives away half of their profits is not the norm, so finding the right partners who believe in our mission is a small step towards a bigger goal to have good influence across the wider business world.
It’s in the small detailsour wrapped rolls make people smile and make them proud to display them in the bathroom. We even have a specially branded ‘emergency roll’ at the end of the box as a reminder to stock up to ensure no one is caught short. This is fun and delightful, but it also works as advertising - a huge amount of our customers first found out about us through seeing it at a friend’s house or in a cafe’s toilet. Half of them have even given our rolls as a gift and we even get 1000s of love letters every year (yes, really!). Our business is about serious stuff, but people are already overwhelmed by the world. We fundamentally don’t believe that guilt and shame is the way to shift
behaviour. So, instead one of our core values is ‘deliver and delight’ - with this sense of fun and levity underpinning every aspect of the customer experience, from our social posts, to the confirmation email, to our limited edition designs.
And it’s in the way we operate as a team - Who Gives a Crap is a ‘globally distributed hybrid remote team’.
mean some weird late nights and early mornings. But it also comes with a huge amount of autonomy and flexibility to find a routine that works for everyone individually, enables me to travel around the world whilst working and forces a brutal prioritisation that helps effectiveness. For the first time in my career, my days are not dominated by meetings. We use various tools like Slack, Loom, Google docs and others that help ‘asynchronous’ workingenabling collaboration without it having to be live. And there is something quite wonderful about watching a recorded meeting that you needed to miss back at 2x speed.
What does that jargon mean? We hire in a geographically agnostic way, so some teams are split across markets. As an exec team, we’re based in Melbourne, Bali, London and LA. We have no global HQ. We have office space available where there are more than five people in a hub, but there’s no requirement to attend (although most of us enjoy a mix). We work across four time zones. We don’t use email. Ooof.
There’s certainly challenges“time is time” is the reluctant acknowledgement when struggling to schedule a meeting. That can
The grounding philosophy in our culture is pretty simple…we give a crap. And it makes sense to, the higher the engagement of the team, the greater impact we can have. We have incredibly generous leave policies that include a ‘life leave’ allowance for the things you might need time off for that aren’t holiday. We’re piloting a four day work week. We invest in bringing the entire company together once a year. The list goes on. Again, unlike a classic start up - more work is not necessarily seen as better. For a recovering workaholic, this was actually quite hard to adjust to - but unsurprisingly helps us be more effective.
So, toilet paper. Who knew. A year in, I’m still no expert - but I’ve learnt a lot; get the big things right, find the fun and delight in amongst the serious and sometimes, login from the beach. Oh, and embrace toilet humour.
Q: What did one piece of TP say to the other?
A: “I feel really wiped.”
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The archives at NLCS are a fascinating collection, from stories to art work, memories to school photos. Looking back at how times have changed, below can be seen the uniform policy of 1965.
Archives Article
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The First NLCS Giving Day was a great success!
The first-ever Giving Day at North London Collegiate School recently ended, and the alumnae community can feel proud of their role in making it a success. Over the course of 36 hours, students, parents, ONLs, and the wider community, past and present all came together to participate in various challenges and events to raise funds for the Bernice McCabe Bursary Fund and IDEAS Hub capital campaign.
The spirit of generosity was overwhelming, with 344 people donating by the end of the Giving Day. What’s more, 200 people made their first-ever donation to North London Collegiate School. The total amount raised was an impressive £178,091 and a portion of it will go towards supporting bursaries for students of promise and talent but with limited financial means. Currently, 1 in 10 students at NLCS receives a bursary award with 65 students on 100% bursaries. Each year we want to ensure we offer more young people the opportunity to experience an NLCS education.
The campaign featured a message of gratitude from a bursary recipient at NLCS. Deluxsy Elangaratnam, Class of 2007, expressed her thanks to the donors and shared her personal experience of what a bursary offer meant to her and how as a paediatrician she gets to make a difference every day.
Scan the QR code below to watch her story:
As an Old North Londoner, your generosity has helped make this Giving Day a huge success. You can take pride in knowing that your support will help shape the lives of future generations of NLCS students.
Thank you for being a part of this historic event and for continuing to support the School in all its endeavours.
The other part of the funds will go towards the new IDEAS Hub, which promises to be an amazing space for current NLCS students and the wider community. This space will provide an opportunity for local schools to compete in academic competitions and emphasise the importance of collaboration.
Visit https://nlcs.givingday.co.uk to watch our Day 1 and Day 2 highlights and see what our students got up to. #NLCSGivingDay2023
Joe Dunster, Fundraising Manager
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Remembering Loved Ones Anne Astwood (Mckay, Payne) NLCS 1965 – 1972
remember her “glorious singing and speaking voice” and her “soaring soprano”. Anne encouraged a group of friends to sing madrigals together; a favourite was The Silver Swan by Orlando Gibbons.
Known to many friends as “Annie”, Anne died of cancer on 18 September 2022 in Australia, her home since 2000. In 2010 she was unexpectedly diagnosed with a brain tumour and the remedial surgery left her with cognitive disabilities which she fought and largely overcame. She was passionate about social justice and had always been an enthusiastic political activist; her illness only increased her commitment to the disadvantaged. Music was another passion and she sang in early music choirs until the end of her life.
At school, Anne was a bright, enthusiastic, cheerful person, full of fun and sometimes mischief – her full length coat from Biba was not regulation! She was interested in all types of music and took every opportunity to sing but was especially interested in early choral music. Friends
Whilst at Stirling University, Anne joined the Communist Party and, together with her first husband, Ian Mckay, worked in support of the miners and mining communities which were severely under threat. She lived and taught for a while in a Scottish mining town and then moved south again to teach in Waltham Forest where she was an active member of the NUT. Another member recalls that her contributions to the debates were always “thoughtful but passionately articulated”.
After emigrating, she joined the Australian Labor Party (although disappointed by the missing “u”!) Locally she began focussing on the way the party itself provided opportunities for disabled people. She subsequently became co-chair and co-convenor of the group “Labour Enabled” which seeks to promote the participation of the disabled within the party.
Anne was working for Worksafe Victoria, an organisation dedicated to reducing harm in the workplace and improving outcomes for injured workers, when her brain tumour was diagnosed. After surgery to remove
the tumour, she could no longer read, write or speak as she used to and her recovery took eighteen months. In her search for a social, as opposed to a medical, model of recovery, Anne enrolled with Voice at the Table, an organisation providing practical guidance and training to enable people with cognitive disabilities to self-advocate. After she graduated Anne became a tutor and was responsible for establishing VATT’s monthly group networking meetings and was a much loved and respected advocate. Although she remembered her previous abilities, Anne never complained and said she was a happier person in the 12 years after her acquired brain injury. Although Anne never regained her ability to read music, major brain surgery did not prevent her following what she was enthusiastic about and she memorised words and music to sing with Melbourne’s Choir of Hard Knocks (for people who have experienced homelessness or disadvantage).
Anne and her second husband, Andy had a daughter, Katie who, I was told, “strongly resembles Anne.” At the celebration of Anne’s life, Katie chose to base her tribute to her mum around Anne’s favourite songs. It was a fitting memorial.
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My ‘Rather Weird’ Mum
If you knew my mum, I don’t have to tell you that she was kind, passionate and sometimes fierce: she was appalled by injustice and unfairness, and she was outspoken in challenging it. She was indignant on behalf of people who are talked over, and spent much of her life working to help them be heard.
While she was generally quite able to make sure she was listened to herself, she obviously felt an affinity for people who are misunderstood and ignored. She wrote in 2004, ‘On those rare occasions when her meanings are taken amiss or not understood and an assumed smooth encounter is engulfed by mismatched expectations and negative assumptions, she can become a person incapable of communicating, of socialising, of thinking — and be strongly drawn never to expose herself to such risk again.’
That’s from ‘One That Got Away’, the book chapter where she first publicly wrote about thinking of herself as being ‘somewhere on the autistic spectrum’ — although at that time (a couple of years before I sought out a formal assessment for autism myself) she said ‘there are reasons why I do not entirely feel I deserve the accolade’, in later years she came to
Remembering Loved Ones Dinah Murray NLCS 1957 – 1964
identify less ambiguously as autistic, as did I.
There’s a long section in that chapter titled ‘Being rather weird’, and Dinah’s acceptance of her own and other people’s weirdness was a defining feature of both her professional and personal life. She was always friends with a wide range of fascinatingly weird people, and when her kids turned out to be fairly odd too, in our different ways, she made sure we didn’t see that as a problem, even if other people sometimes might. I owe to her my ability to be proudly weird, and I shudder to think where I would be without it: probably no less weird, just much less comfortable with it.
I think she helped a lot of people to accept themselves, and I know she helped a lot of people to understand themselves better. Her framework for understanding autism, and her insights into thinking about neurodiversity more broadly, will make a difference for decades to come: she died feeling she had achieved her life’s work, a firm foundation for people to work from, her ideas increasingly accepted and recognised.
We talked a lot in her last weeks about the lives she’d touched, the ways that people appreciated her and how much she loved them back. She had a way of connecting people
who needed to be connected. I read to her from the book ‘Humankind’, about the weight of evidence that people, by and large, are fundamentally decent; Leo read to her from ‘Entangled Life’, about mushrooms, mycelia and the interconnectedness of all living things. Both books felt like they were filling in details of things she already deeply felt, understood and embodied.
Dinah died of pancreatic cancer on Wednesday 7 July 2021. She was well cared for and surrounded by love, and experienced surprisingly little pain.
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Remembering Loved Ones
Joan Clanchy
Joan Clanchy, Headmistress of North London Collegiate School (NLCS), had no affection for the exam system which put her school at the top of the league tables. When the A* at GCSE was introduced in 1994, she lamented that “we do not need the extra spur. It will lead to nervousness and cramming, which it will be very hard to resist.”
She felt that the British education system had an obsession with exams, which not only unfairly privileged students in schools like hers, who could be coached to attain straight As, but also forced teachers to chase results instead of following their pedagogical instincts.
In 1991 she was made a member of the National Curriculum Council (NCC), where she argued against the Grad- grinds who wanted to introduce exams in Year 9. She resigned her role in 1993 in protest at the English curriculum drawn up by the council, at the request of the Education Secretary John Patten. In accordance with his wishes, the new curriculum renewed focus on grammar, spelling and punctuation, requiring seven-year-olds to know how to use capital letters and full stops, 11-year-olds to use commas correctly, and 16-year-olds commas and semi-colons.
“I pepper my writing with commas,” Clanchy said. “I am a real colon
enthusiast. But you build up punctuation gradually through children’s writing, not by teaching the use of the comma at a certain stage.” The proposal which most rankled her, however, was that students should be marked down in oral examinations for speaking in dialect.
In her letter of resignation from the NCC to Patten, she wrote that “the dominant aim has become a curriculum designed for tests, and the result is a model of English teaching which is barren and anti-intellectual”. It was as if, she continued, “the Highway Code had been narrowed down to instructions on the three-point turn”.
A focus on rote learning was the antithesis of the ethos she followed as Headmistress of NLCS, where she set aside time on Thursdays for students to study subjects outside the curriculum and question guests of the School. She also set up a “Young Enterprise” scheme, in which she encouraged her students to “sell each other junk”. She assumed headship of the School in 1986, at a time when the idea of single-sex education was out of fashion. Many boys’ schools, such as Westminster, had begun to accept girls into the Sixth Form, while the finances of private schools in general were precarious. Clanchy believed that single-sex schools such as NLCS afforded girls the chance to build up a confidence that they
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might not acquire elsewhere. One of her first acts as Headmistress was to abolish domestic sciences, which she regarded as sexist, and she told her girls that while it was impossible for a woman to “have it all”, it was also important to try.
In their attempts to do so, her students could hardly follow a more confident role model than Clanchy herself, who had always believed she was “one of nature’s head girls”. Statuesque and immaculately dressed, she could assume a gaze that one staff member described as “not hostile, but not warm either, simply a look which showed she was weighing up the comment she had heard. It could be disarming but it was pure Clanchy.”
Yet as well as cutting such an imposing figure, she was approachable and believed that the main job of a teacher was to pay attention generously, telling her staff to “cast your bread upon the waters, and it will come back as sandwiches”.
Her desire to spend lavishly to provide the best education for her pupils conflicted with her reluctance to raise fees. After retiring in 1997, she became the chairwoman of governors at St Mary and St John, a state primary school in Oxford, taking pleasure in organising a chess club for the pupils.
Remembering Loved Ones
Joan Milne was born in Glasgow in 1939, the daughter of Leslie and Mary (née Berry). Her father had left school at 14 to work as a barrow boy in the Glasgow food market, eventually becoming an auctioneer then setting up his own business. Wishing to give Joan a start in life they did not have, but knowing little about private schools, her parents sent her to Park School for Girls in Glasgow, then St Hilda’s School for Girls in Stirlingshire. Unhappy at the latter, she heard friends talking about St Leonards, a girls’ school in St Andrews that modelled its curriculum on that of boys’ public schools in England to the point of making the girls play cricket on the windy Fife coast. She convinced her parents to let her go there, and after three years at the school she worked as an au pair in the Rheims home of the Heidsieck family of champagne makers.
She studied history at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she became the President of the Junior Common Room and helped Paul Foot and Richard Ingrams to produce a magazine, Parson’s Pleasure. She was friends with a historian at Merton, Michael Clanchy, who enticingly was the owner of a car, but they did not get together until both had moved on to teacher training. They married in 1963 and had two children who survive them: James, a lawyer, and
Kate, a teacher and writer. Michael died two weeks after his wife.
Clanchy’s first teaching job was at Woodberry Down School in London. The family then moved to Glasgow, where Michael had been offered a lectureship in history at the university. With her weighty social conscience, Clanchy wished to stay in the state sector, though was told that Glasgow district council did not employ married women, so took up a post at her alma mater, Park School, instead.
At the age of 36 she became the Headmistress of St George’s School for Girls in Edinburgh, to which the family upped sticks. As they were leaving, their next door neighbour, the editor of The Glasgow Herald, ran a news story about how Michael would now have to commute to Glasgow for his wife’s convenience. He meant this as a friendly gesture, but Clanchy made sure he knew how inappropriate she thought it.
Joan Clanchy, Headmistress, was born on 26 August 1939. She died of lupus on 15 January 2021, aged 81
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Remembering Loved Ones
Margaret Bunford (née Taylor) NLCS 1940 – 1948
Margaret died in February 2023, aged 92, in a care home in Sheffield where she had lived for the last three years of her life, close to one of her three daughters. Her commitment to the School and to ONLA was long and productive but only one of Margaret’s many enthusiasms.
In the 1930s Margaret’s father was working as an accountant in London. His partner’s daughter was at North London Collegiate and recommended the school; the family moved to Dalkeith Grove, so that Margaret could come here.
Most recently for ONLA, Margaret took responsibility for organising the reunions for ONLs who left more than fifty years ago. The first lunch was in April 1995 and Margaret collected War Time Memories preceding the event. The book sold well on the day of the lunch and also was popular with current pupils.
For the book of memories of school in wartime, Margaret recalled that when war broke out in 1939, she was initially, sent to her grandparents who farmed in Northamptonshire. However, eventually her parents decided that the family should be together so she returned home and joined NLCS at the beginning of the Autumn term, in 1940. Her journey
to school was just a short walk up the road from home. Shelters were built at school on the ground floor and even exams were conducted in the shelter at times if there was an air raid.
Margaret remembered that everyone’s gardens were turned over to growing food and that all children had extra milk at school. She thought Domestic Bursar, Miss Turpin did a good job, despite food shortages and the school meals were very nourishing although the pupils may not have been impressed at the time! One day Margaret found a nut from a piece of kitchen equipment, in the boiled sponge pudding. Taking it, with some glee, to Miss Turpin, she was disappointed to hear “Ah, we have been looking for that all morning, thank you so much!”
Margaret had a successful academic career at school and went on to Bedford College, graduating in social work. She subsequently worked for Remploy, assisting disabled people into work.
She met her husband, John Taylor on a blind date. Hoping to impress her, John took her for a drive in his Alvis sportscar, only for the car to break down. Needing a screwdriver to effect repairs, John was impressed when Margaret produced one from
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her handbag! They married in 1956 and had three daughters, Sally, Caroline and Fiona.
Until 1982, Margaret worked for ONLA as the “Address Secretary”. She inherited the traditional means of keeping up to date with ONLs’ changes of address and names which was very simple – asking them to sign an attendance “register” when they came to Founder’s Day or other event. Members’ details were recorded on index cards. Roughly 6,000 of these cards were donated to the school’s archive in 2009, many of them bearing Margaret’s amendments.
In addition, Margaret worked hard for the School as a governor between 1993 and 2006 and as Vice Chairman of Governors to first Ian McGregor and then Helen Stone (ONL) as Chair. Helen recalled:
“[Margaret] was a marvellous fount of knowledge, and I much enjoyed working together on the numerous challenges of governing NLCS. I have particularly nice memories of going to dinner with Margaret and John in Northwood during that period. His wry humour and Margaret’s fabulous hospitality combined to provide a wonderful time.
…. Margaret’s positive outlook and business-like approach were always very welcome attributes.”
Margaret’s steadfast commitment to the School has never wavered but she was always the driving force at the heart of celebrations to honour the contributions made by others,
in particular, the ONLA centenary dinner in 1973 and the dinner for Madeleine McLauchlan’s retirement in 1985. Margaret was elected Vice President of the Association in 1995 and became the champion for pre-1950 leavers. She organised a Sesquicentenary Lunch for them and the event was repeated in 2005 and 2010.
Apart from her dedication to the School and to ONLA, Margaret had many other interests and was regarded by her family and friends as a force of nature, multi tasker (“She was always busy”) and a persuasive recruiter of volunteers in support of all the organisations she herself supported. She was a founder member of one of the very early NADFAS, National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies (now The Arts Society) and was an Honorary Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Horners.
As a fund raiser, Margaret was associated with the Sunshine Home for Blind Children near her home in Northwood (now run by RNIB) and sat on the Cancer Research UK committee. A friend remembered working with Margaret on a small charity which gave money to schools for projects. Their meetings were held at Margaret’s home and as always, Margaret was the driving force. “Even in small activities she made things happen”.
Since 2000, her daughter, Fiona, has worked at Montgomery Heights, an orphanage in Zimbabwe. Margaret collected books, toys, medicines, clothes, bicycles and garden and
kitchen equipment to send to the orphanage. The boxes – which filled an enormous shipping container –were packed in Margaret’s garage, mostly by Margaret herself although at least two ONLs will remember being recruited for the job! For as long as she could, Margaret visited the orphanage for a month every year to help wherever she could and becoming affectionately known as “Mummy Bunford”.
Margaret served as a JP for 28 years, retiring at the age of 70. When she began it was the convention that the longest serving JP would become Bench Chairman but – with typical perspicacity – Margaret considered that longevity did not necessarily ensure the skillset needed by the Chair. She pioneered appraisals and skillbased elections and helped to develop training for the bench. She was a member of the Middlesex Advisory Committee for the appointment of magistrates as well as the National Probation Committee and later became a prison visitor through the Howard League for Penal Reform.
In 2018, NLCS made a small tribute to Margaret to recognise the unique contribution she made to the life of the School. Her many friends, both in and outside of school attested to Margaret’s many qualities; positivity, generous hospitality, cooking, efficiency combined with tact and charm, a “do-er”. Margaret Bunford encapsulated intelligence, compassion and social skills; we have been fortunate to have known her.
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Remembering Loved Ones
Juliet Coffer
NLCS 1982 – 1989
Juliet died on 24th August 2022 aged 51. She had a vibrant personality and was always resolute, even during the hardest times of her illness. Indeed, included in her funeral instructions was the fact that all attendees needed to wear bright colours. Those of you who spent time with Juliet will understand this.
Juliet really enjoyed her years at NLCS and always said that the School provided the best basis for her attitude towards life and work. She was also very proud to have been presented a prize by Esther Rantzen, aged 11, for dressing up as a pea pod!
She went on to study at Manchester University and graduated with a 2:1 which then led to a career in commerce. She was multi-talentedIT trainer, website manager/designer - a real creative talent.
Juliet became ill with sarcoidosis in 2005. This is a rare condition which causes small patches of swollen tissue, called granulomas, to develop on organs of the body. In Juliet’s case it affected her lungs to the extent that, latterly, she only had 50% lung capacity. In the last few years, she also developed pulmonary hypertension, lymphoma, myofascial pain syndrome and
was on 24/7 oxygen. She had been shielding for over 900 days as she was immunosuppressed and feared getting Covid.
She bore her illness with bravery and fortitude although sometimes in extreme pain. Despite the deterioration in her health, she continued working and her husband, Gary, gave her incredible support. Her courage remained. In 2021, when barely able to walk she did a ‘Juliet marathon’ for Sarcoidosis UK to raise funds and awareness of the disease. By walking 3,000 metres in 30 days - all she was capable of doing - she raised over £50,000 in sponsorship. Awareness was raised too as she was featured on BBC, ITV, in national and local press, on Radio 5, LBC and she became the media go-to when questions of disability or shielding arose.
In 2022, she raised further funds by her ‘Hallway Challenge’, where she walked only 10 metres a day - a sign of her deteriorating health. Her Just Giving pages are still receiving donations and in November 2022 she was awarded a posthumous certificate, given by local media, in recognition of her fundraising success.
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Destination of our 2022 Leavers
The impressively wide range of disciplines taken up at Higher Education by the class of 2022 include: Anthropology, Archaeology, Architectural & Interdisciplinary Studies, Automotive Engineering, Biochemistry, Biological Sciences, Biology, Biomedical Science, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Classical Civilisation and English, Classics, Computer Science, Drama and English, Economics, Russian, English Literature, Financial Mathematics, French, Geography, German, Global Development, Health & Medical Sciences, History, History and Politics of the Americas, Human, Social, and Political
Italian, International Relations, Law, Liberal Arts, Materials Science,
Mechanical
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Sciences,
Mathematics,
Modern Languages, Natural Sciences, Neuroscience, Persian, Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Physics, Portuguese, Psychology, Russian Studies and History, Social Sciences, Spanish, Veterinary Medicine. TEN PHILOSOPHY POLITICS ECONOMICS MEDICINE LIBERAL ARTS LAW HISTORY MECHANICAL ENGINEERING LANGUAGES SCIENCE ENGLISH LITERATURE MATHEMATICS SUBJECT AREAS 10 15 5 5 13 8 8 7 7 6 6 Birmingham 2 Bristol ....................................................................7 Buckingham 1 Cambridge 8 Durham 2 Edinburgh 7 Imperial College London 6 King’s College London, University of London 6 Leeds 5 Leicester ............................................................... 1 London School of Economics and Political Science 5 Loughborough 1 Manchester 2 Nottingham 3 Oxford 13 Plymouth 1 Queen Mary’s London 1 Royal Holloway .................................................. 1 St George’s, University of London 1 University College London 15 Warwick .............................................................. 8 13 20 9 17 7 6 3 3 3 3 TOP TOP UNIVERSITY
Engineering, Medical Genetics, Medicine,
DESTINATIONS
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON 15 UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 13 UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE 8 UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK 8 UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL 7 THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 7 IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON 6 UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS 5 KING’S COLLEGE LONDON, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 6 LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE 5 96 8 STUDENTS STUDYING AT UK UNIVERSITIES STUDENTS STUDYING AT US UNIVERSITIES STUDENTS STUDYING AT US UNIVERSITIES Brown 2 Columbia 1 Notre Dame 1 Princeton 1 UC Berkeley .........................................................................1 University of Southern California 1 Yale 1
The IDEAS Hub
Lisa Timm Director of STEAM and Innovation
The IDEAS Hub represents an ambitious new vision, centered on a new facility that will transform the physical presence of NLCS and enrich the education we can offer to both our students and the community.
It will position NLCS at the forefront of innovative education with a focus on nurturing our students’ ambitions and our teachers’ passions for their subjects. Reflecting the importance of the coherence between subjects as well as the value gained from the
differences between them will make our students confident architects of their own education.
Blending in seamlessly with the ethos of the International Baccalaureate and augmenting our students’
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experience of A Levels, the work the IDEAS Hub will facilitate will foster life-long learners who have an appreciation for their position in the world, academically, culturally, and ethically.
From exploring Human Rights through Model United Nations, to creating multimedia art installations raising awareness for environmental
challenges, the Atrium, Make Space and new Art and EDT facilities will encourage our students to engage with problems across academic disciplines and will enable them to work in partnership with students from other schools, and with industry professionals. Through our business partnerships, we will give our students an understanding of
the breadth and wealth of career opportunities available to them, whether through mentored projects or career-based workshops.
As the ONL community, we would be delighted to invite you to contribute to the even more vibrant extra-curricular life the IDEAS Hub will enable us to have from Spring 2024.
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January 2022
Construction timeline
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January 2023
December 2022
February 2023
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August 2022
September 2022
November 2022
October 2022
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Finished Digital
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Construction timeline
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Intelligence can be artificial
Is creativity next?
Hannah Mills Class of 2012
If you have not yet tried ChatGPT, the recently released artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, you’re probably feeling relaxed, generally content and at peace with the world as you know it. I’m sorry to tell you this, but it won’t last.
Sooner or later, someone will whip out their phone and show you how the tool works, and you’ll begin to wonder what on earth you’re going to do with yourself from now on.
The chatbot can plan a wedding, draft your best man’s speech and book your honeymoon. Once you’re back, it can create a business plan for your new start-up, generate your three-year financial projections and develop a flashy website. In fact, there may be no point flying home because the business probably won’t need you.
I’m only partly exaggerating. The AI model that underpins ChatGPT
has been “trained” with information from more books, journals, websites and images than we mere mortals can imagine. These sources form a database of knowledge about anything and everything – guidance on how to do your tax return, what exactly is special relativity, an example haiku about your annoying step-father, I could go on…
It can process and synthesise information in seconds, completing
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research that might otherwise have taken days or weeks. The technology is capable of understanding dialogue and even remembers things you told it earlier (something that can’t always be said for everyone in your life).
Without wishing to offend any accountants in the ONL community, I’m not overly concerned that AI might help speed up our tax returns. We could all do with a little less faffing around with confusing online forms or frantic googling. For me, things feel more sinister when it comes to creative content production, especially creative writing.
I have just asked ChatGPT to write me a short story about a young girl in a brown school uniform – let’s call her Hannah. It’s no Katherine Mansfield, but there is some character development in there, a narrative arc and even a dash of humour. Hannah finds a kindred spirit in a boy called Timmy who is feeling lonely at school. They form a strong bond and Hannah learns the importance of kindness and empathy. Admittedly, the corny closing line isn’t to my taste: “Hannah still wore her brown uniform with pride – it had brought her not only a sense of belonging, but also a life-long friend.”
Turning to verse form (I couldn’t resist!), here is an artificially intelligent rhyme dedicated to an esteemed founder:
Today, NLCS is still going strong, A testament to Buss, and her life-long song,
And though she’s gone, her spirit remains,
A beacon of hope, for girls with brains.
So here’s to Frances Mary Buss, a pioneer,
Who gave girls a voice, and made it clear,
That education is for all, whatever their gender,
And we owe her a debt, that we’ll always remember.
Is this the beginning of the end for poets, playwrights and novelists?
The examples above aren’t brilliant but they certainly aren’t bad, and the chatbot won’t need arts funding or an advance on a book deal. With access to a vast historical library, a model can generate material inspired by popular works, and could do the same for art, music, cinema and architecture. Artificial creativity – it’s a daunting thought.
But never fear, all is not lost.
An AI tool is only as good as the information with which it is fed.
To give you an example, ChatGPT’s “intelligence” only extends to 2021 because it has not been trained on data produced after that. If you ask a question that requires information generated in 2022, the chatbot may not be able to answer or the response will likely be inaccurate. That’s so last year…
More disturbingly, AI models are often behind the times in their representation of gender and race. By “learning” from historical content, they are exposed to human biases
that we now try to avoid. There have been more male scientists than women over time, and more women playing the role of homemaker. Particularly in American data sources, there is more derogatory language used in reference to black communities as compared to white. Such associations are reinforced when a machine processes this information, perpetuating stereotypes that are (or should be) increasingly defunct.
This foible is the same one that gives me confidence in the future of the creative arts. It could well be possible for an AI tool to pen a great play or a successful film script. But it will never fully replace human creativity because it relies on a steady stream of inputs to stay relevant. The technology cannot generate original thoughts or a unique perspective. These must always come from scatter-brained, emotionally-charged, everfluctuating human beings. The best creative content can only come from an assembly individuals who feel, imagine, forget, misunderstand and change their minds.
That’s not to say AI cannot have a positive role in creative production. It is true that tools like ChatGPT can only “learn” from others’ ideas but, in doing so, they provide access to a world of information that can challenge and inspire creativity. It is a neat cycle of collaborative learning, a new stage in the partnership between mankind and machine.
And if it can help with my tax return, that’s all the better.
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BOOK CORNER
ANN MILTON Class of 1981
A Breast Cancer Alphabet is a wonderfully user friendly ABC of how to deal with the devastating news of having cancer. It will even help you try to get through it with a smile. This is advice from A to Z that should be read before, during, and after you are throttled with the unexpected news this is now your life.
JULIA HOLLENBERY Class of 1986
This book presents an invitation to reawaken your body, realise the depth and web of relationships within which we live, and embrace the pleasure, power, and potency that arise when we look inward as well as confidently relate outward with the world around us.
NEHA THAKRAR AND FALGU SHAH Class of 2008
Maya and her Magic Lehenga is a children’s book (2 - 5 years) about a young South Asian girl who recounts precious memories with family and friends when she comes across her hidden lehenga (Indian festive dress). We wrote this book because growing up South Asian, we did not
STEPHANIE LEVER Class of 2017
With 1,000 illustrations, carefully selected from the magazine’s invaluable archives, it offers an overview of the fashion industry and its history from Paul Poiret to Christian Dior, supermodels and “It Girls,” also exploring Paris as a fashion capital.
have many children’s books with characters that looked like us, or stories that related to our cultural customs and experiences. We are excited to see more representative content for children these days, and wrote this book to bring more stories to life.
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TIFFANY PHILIPPOU Class of 2006
This is a heartfelt memoir on grief, shame and love. It’s an honest and ultimately hopeful account of Tiffany’s life after the tragic suicide of her boyfriend, Richard, when the couple were students at Bristol University in 2008. The book follows her journey in the ten years after Richard’s death - as Tiffany confesses - she spent her twenties pretending this incident
didn’t happen. She was isolated in grief and left alone to absorb the discomfort and judgement of others she felt following his passing. In her own words, ‘Richard was living with a lot of shame before he died. I felt silenced and oppressed by shame once he was gone.’
Our twenties are all about selfdiscovery and adventure; it’s a decade of many firsts as we establish our careers and relationships in the adult world. Yet there isn’t a guidebook on how to grieve, especially when processing such an event at this pivotal stage of life.
It has taken Tiffany many years to navigate her grief and shame but by opening up and embracing her past she has been able to look to the future and to understand that there is no right way to grieve and no right way to live. Her hope, is that by sharing her story, she can encourage others to tear down the walls and to not suffer under the burden of shame alone.
Totally Fine (and other lies I’ve told myself) is a beautifully written and poignant story that will deeply resonate with anyone navigating layers of loss, heartbreak or rejection.
DR ELAINE MOORE Class of 1966
This undergraduate text aimed primarily at high schoolers and lower level undergraduates focuses on explaining how the various forms of renewable energy work and the current ongoing research. It includes sections on non-scientific aspects that should be considered such as availability of resources. A final chapter covers methods of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
ALISON WRAY Class of 1978
As well as difficulties with how they use words and language, people with dementia are likely to have sight or hearing problems which can also make it harder to communicate.
Renewable energy is currently on everyone’s mind in the context of climate change. This text provides students with an introduction into the science behind the various types of renewable energy enabling them to access review literature in the field and options that that should be considered when selecting methods.
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The Frances Mary Buss Fellowship
ONLs and individuals who remember North London in their Will become members of The Frances Mary Buss Fellowship and receive a daffodil pin in recognition of their support to the School.
Members are invited to annual events, hosted by the Headmistress, to recognise their commitment and support. If you would like to receive an information pack or speak in confidence about leaving a legacy to North London, please contact Gavin Mann, Director of Development: 020 3946 8933 gmann@nlcs.org.uk
Buzz Square
Frances Mary Buss has over 2,800 friends on Facebook, 1,900 connections on LinkedIn, and 389 followers on Instagram. If you would like to become a member of the online ONLA community, please add Frances Mary Buss on Facebook and connect with us on LinkedIn. Please also join ONL connect, our social media platform only available to members of the NLCS Community. We have many regional and career networking groups, as well as groups dedicated to each year group.
Forthcoming Events 2023
SEPTEMBER
12th Class of 2022, 1-Year Reunion
20th Class of 1973, 50-Year Reunion
OCTOBER
10th 55+ Reunion
Termly Newsletter
At the end of every term we release a Newsletter for ONLs to keep up with news about old friends, achievements, and general school life. If you or another ONL have share worthy news or would like to be featured in the latest edition please get in contact with The Development and Alumni Department – ONLA@nlcs.org.uk
Volunteers
We have many opportunities to volunteer at NLCS, from mentoring to helping out at ONL-based events.
For those ONLs looking to get involved in our mentor scheme, you can get in touch with us via email at onlmentor@nlcs.org.uk
Legacies
For those who valued their time at North London, a legacy is a powerful way of giving something back, as well as providing opportunities for the next generation of students. Since its earliest days, North London Collegiate School has been the grateful beneficiary of legacy gifts, providing a vital source of funds. Bequests, big and small, have helped shape the School from its foundation to the present day. Over the years, legacy gifts have helped fund bursaries and support sport, science, music and the arts, and
enable the School to build important capital projects. A legacy is one of the greatest gifts you can make and is a lasting testimony to your affection for the school. Bequests can be made for bursaries, for specific project, or used ‘where the need is greatest’ North London is a registered charity, so all legacies to the school are exempt form Inheritance Tax.
Thank you
We want to thank all those who helped our NLCS students last year. In 2022, the School welcomed over 100 visiting speakers at various societies, many ONLs for Careers Conventions, 24 Panellists, and over 100 mentors. Thank you to everyone who was involved for helping to enrich our students’ educational experience and support their future education and careers.