Commemoration 2016
Commemoration 2016: the Head Master’s address On a train journey back from London over half term, I was looking at the letters section of a national newspaper – the sort of thing you can do in holiday time. My eye, which has become conditioned to notice things that relate to education, fell upon a letter from a gentleman who wrote in from the pleasant North Yorkshire village of Coneythorpe: Sir – I was assisting my 16-year-old daughter with her homework when she received a text from Mum, which read: “What do you want from life?” This was an unexpected and profound question for an exam-sitting teenager. We debated various answers – wealth, fulfilment, love – all three. Five minutes later, she received a second message from Mum, blaming predictive text for auto-correcting her intended question: “What do you want from Lidl?”.
In October of this academic year, our Careers department, which plays a significant role in this preparation, received the Career Mark 6 Quality Award, making us one of only seven independent schools to hold this accreditation. Undoubtedly, one of the qualifying factors was our annual Careers Convention, which this year attracted 67 advisors, many of them Old Peterites, who offered expert guidance on an extensive range of future pathways.
A much more accessible question for an exam-sitting 16-yearold to tackle … but, what of that first, accidental question – the big one: what do you want from life? How might the pupils present answer that question? How might we adults respond? What answer would each of our 105 upper-sixth leavers give? Different ones, I hope: 105 individual responses from 105 individual young adults whose values, beliefs and hopes have been shaped and refined by their experiences at school.
Our largest ever cohort of A-Level candidates, the 2015 vintage, achieved an astonishing set of examination results, with a quarter of all exams passed at A*, and some wonderful individual triumphs. At GCSE, the current lower sixth cohort passed 40% of their exams at the highest grade. A special mention must go to the Mathematics department whose pupils achieved 77% A/A* at A-level and 61% A* at IGCSE with a 100% pass rate at this compulsory level – for the second consecutive year.
St Peter’s School started life as a very small boarding community. In many ways, we still operate from a boarding culture: the house structure; the emphasis on the co-curricular as well as the academic; the six-day week that allows our pupils to pursue multiple interests.
No wonder that 83 pupils continued with Maths in the sixth form! Whilst we all know that examination statistics do not tell you all you need to know about a person – or a yeargroup for that matter – the 2015 results were nonetheless very impressive indeed.
Our 21st-century all-round education has its roots in the Christian monastic community founded on this very site by St Paulinus in 627 AD: a community founded to seek out the answers to the biggest questions in life; questions whose answers may indeed be found within these ancient walls.
One of the many fine characteristics of academic life at St Peter’s is the unabashed enjoyment of shared intellectual curiosity. The St Peter’s Challenge competitions (our version of University Challenge) were hotly contested and well supported. Pupil-led magazines, such as Peternomics and Keystone (the arts and culture magazine) provide outlets for exploration and lively expression. Colleagues in Science and Design have delivered dynamic outreach sessions for the public, for feeder schools and for our own pre-prep pupils at Clifton School. The tenth St Peter’s School Physics Olympics competition for Year-8 pupils attracted 35 school teams from across the north. Our York Schools’ Science Quiz was well attended, as was our conference for 90 science technicians from almost 40 different schools.
As ever, we are deeply grateful to the Dean and to the Chapter of York Minster for allowing us to gather here to mark the passing of another year – the 1389th – in the school’s long history. Arthur Leach (in Fortnightly Review, November 1892) notably remarked that St Peter’s School is ‘older than the House of Commons, older than the universities, older than the Lord Mayoralty, older than the House of Lords, older even than the throne or nation itself.’ This year, the nation celebrated Her Majesty The Queen’s 90th birthday with street parties and the lighting of beacons across the land. A beacon herself – of dignity, integrity
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and constancy in a changing world – the Queen has reigned during a period of unprecedented change. The profound responsibility of a school is to act as a beacon: to guide and prepare children as fully as possible for the changes and challenges of adult life. We do this by making school life rich and varied; by instilling values that endure for a lifetime; by preparing our pupils’ minds for action.
The Peterite 2015-2016
The English and Library departments gave us the Booker Prize Debate and a new creative writing competition. Debating has now extended beyond the mother tongue, with 33 schools
