Commemoration

Commemoration 2018

Commemoration 2018: the Head Master’s address

A few weeks ago, I met an elderly Old Peterite, who had returned to the school for a reunion event - an anniversary drinks do. After a while in general conversation, he detached himself from the gathering and shuffled down the corridor. Following him down, I found the old chap in a reverie of nostalgic recollection in the Chapel. We fell into conversation. He had left St Peter’s in 1948 aged 18, he told me, and he then began reminiscing, in hushed tones, about various antics he was involved in at school. He remembered the other boys in his class; the games coaches and teachers; the matches won and lost. It was when he came to describe his housemaster that his eyes welled up. This was a saintly figure in his memory. Someone who had shaped and guided him.

After an appreciative silence, I ventured a question. “So, who was the Head Master when you were here?”. He stopped to think. A long pause followed. Finally, the response came: “Head Master…?” he said. “Yes…. I suppose we must have had one”.

[Canon Chancellor, the Right Honourable, the Lord Mayor of York; The Lady Mayoress; Deputy Lieutenant; Superintendent; Sheriff Consort; the Sheriff of York; governors and honoured guests, pupils, staff, parents, and friends: thank you all for gathering on this special day of Commemoration and PrizeGiving.] It is a matter of historical record that the first three Head Masters of St Peter’s were Saints. Literally. St Paulinus; St James the Deacon; St Wilfrid. Now, that’s a pretty tough benchmark to set. And, let’s be honest, it’s been downhill all the way since then! Head Masters are always going to fall short. Or be forgotten. This invaluable certainty has helped me to keep my feet firmly on the ground.

“In spite of the fact that schools are not very easy to work in these days of stress, I think I may confidently affirm that in every way this is the most successful year which I have had the good fortune to review”.

Not my words, but those of my predecessor, Head Master Sam Toyne, in the Commemoration Address that he gave 100 years ago on St Peter’s Day, the 29th June 1918. As I begin my final commemoration address as Head Master of St Peter’s, one hundred years on, I believe that I can truthfully say exactly the same. In Sam Toyne’s day, the School comprised just under 250 boys, almost all of them boarders. Today, we look after 1,100 girls and boys from the age of 2 to 18. The success that we enjoy and celebrate today is as diverse as the school community itself.

As a school, the vision we created is to be a happy, thriving 3-18 co-educational day and boarding school community that combines a classical, high quality, all-round education with a forward-looking and exciting approach to learning. We try to live by our seven values: seven qualities that are truly universal, but that spring from the deep source of the Christian faith. The inclusive pastoral tone of the school is of critical importance in ensuring that each child feels valued for the individual that they are, so that they can grow and develop in confidence.

This is surely the most complex time in the history of human civilization in which to grow up. We continue to work hard to achieve a balance between challenge and care. Making sensible decisions at a time when the mind and body are in a state of rampant civil unrest is far from easy. Children will make mistakes. There will be disasters as well as triumphs. As educators, we must aim to blend sympathetic understanding with firm and certain guidance.

A wise person observed that success has many parents, but failure is an orphan. This no longer holds true. Nowadays, we promote the notion that we learn more from our mistakes than we do from our triumphs. Failure is thus best understood as a teacher, and not an undertaker; disappointment the architect of happiness.

As you would expect in a Commemoration address, however, my comments today will focus on various accomplishments and successes of our community. In doing so, we celebrate aspiration, striving, endurance, resourcefulness, participation, teamwork – as well as achievement. Each and every pupil in the school has done remarkable things this year. The foundation of these many accomplishments is a community of friendship; a learning community that tries its best and wants to learn from its mistakes.

This has indeed been a wonderful year for the School. We started on the crest of the wave caused by the summer’s uplifting ISI inspection report which found us to be excellent in all areas. We were short-listed for three TES Independent Schools Awards. Our 3-8 pre-Prep, Clifton School and Nursery won the prep school category, to our great delight. St Peter’s was shortlisted for independent-state partnership of the year and the Boarding Schools’ Association Award for work with vulnerable children.

Our mutually beneficial partnership work with state schools, and within the local community, has been commended by in a personal letter from the Parliamentary Undersecretary for Schools, Lord Agnew.

On Wednesday, I attended a roundtable meeting with the Secretary of State for Education at Number 10 Downing Street discussing the multi-lateral benefits of cross-sector partnership and how the York model can be replicated and shared elsewhere.

The Education Secretary was emphatic in his depiction of a single education system, one teaching profession, of which the independent sector is an important contributing part. We live in an age of educational pluralism and - for the moment at least - the mood is one of mutually beneficial cross-sector working for the benefit of all children and all teachers. Something that I know Geoff has championed personally. Our wide-ranging debating and public speaking programme, which entails a strong element of outreach, was recognised nationally as we accepted the English Speaking Union Debating Culture School of the Year Award for 2018. We were thrilled to receive this national recognition for an outstanding and outward-looking debating programme.

Turning to the athletic, we have enjoyed extraordinary success on the sports field. After a successful sports tour to South Africa, our 1st XI girls’ hockey squad won the county and regional finals to qualify for the nationals, putting them in the top eight teams in the country: a landmark achievement for girls’ sport at St Peter’s.

Yesterday, I was delighted to present the St Peter’s Award - for excellence in any aspect of school life - to Emilia Proctor: a phenomenal sportswoman who has achieved national representation in both hockey and equestrianism. Several rowing crews made C finals at the National Schools Regatta and we have had regional representative success in rugby, hockey, tennis, athletics and cross-country, to name a few.

Following an excellent summer rugby tour of Argentina, the 1st XV went on to complete an unbeaten season in regular fixtures and ended the year ranked sixth in the country. Ten teams across the age groups played a full season of rugby: as a school, we lost only three times.

Rightly, our Director of Sport’s response was to change the fixture list for next season so that we can be challenged by, and learn from, tougher opponents. At the Rosslyn Park Sevens rugby sevens, our boys won nine matches in a row to reach the final. This meant that we finished the blue riband national event in the runners-up spot out of over 150 teams.

The Memorial Hall has hosted a phenomenal range of cultural events this year. As our main theatre space, it has been transformed into a forest for Shakespeare’s As You like It and into a hotel for a wonderfully inventive A2 theatre studies production. Choral Evensong at St Paul’s Cathedral and varied concert programmes here at the Minster, and back at school, have kept music at the heart of our community, and a tour to Venice sets forth in July.

The Art School has put on no fewer than six stunning exhibitions of pupils staff and visiting artists work. Next year we will add a visiting ceramicist to our creative team, quite appropriately as York now holds the national collection of ceramics. For me, the artistic highlight of the year was the extraordinary partnership with Martin House Children’s Hospice. This culminated in a group of young adults with life-limiting illnesses, who are wheel-chairbound, displaying their work in the Whitestone Gallery. Generously facilitated by our wonderful team in the Art Department, this occasion was both humbling and life affirming.

This year we have been overseeing the construction of a fantastic new home for all Maths and Modern Languages teaching. We chose to call it the Pascal Building after the French philosopher, mathematician and polymath, Blaise Pascal. Pascal has given his name to a unit of pressure, an island in Antarctic, a crater on the moon and a computer programming language. Now he has a little bit of Yorkshire to his name too. Pascal’s rare amalgam of omnivorous scientific learning and deeply felt religious belief fits well with our values. The Pascal Building, with 16 classrooms, various group breakout rooms, and a pupil-designed independent learning space, will open its doors in September. A game-changing teaching and learning hub, it is a great credit to all involved in the design and delivery of this exciting new facility.

Looking at the intellectual and cultural life of the school there are so many examples of the richness of opportunity. The free of charge, open to all St Peter’s School public lecture series continues to bring in a host of headline speakers, such as Terry Waite, Gavin Esler, Baroness Warsi, and AC Grayling. Our partnership with the York Literature Festival and the Festival of Ideas brings us together with the University of York, the Ogden Trust and numerous other partners in contributing to the cultural life of the city.

Meanwhile our pupils have been extending themselves across a host of additional intellectual challenges. Our Schools Challenge team had a tremendous run, winning the regional finals against Manchester Grammar School and travelling to London for the national finals, where they reached the last four, but lost to the eventual winners, Westminster School.

Once again, a St Peter’s team showed engineering, as well as marketing, acumen in reaching the national finals of the ‘Formula 1 in Schools’ competition, racing their car at Silverstone and managing a podium finish. Elsewhere, a team of Fourth Form mathematicians won a national Further Maths competition that tested their teamwork and communication skills, as well as their mathematical

ability. These are just a few heartening examples of the wider intellectual engagement at the school.

Academically, all schools in England are going through a major transition in the external examination system. GCSE course content is changing and we are moving toward numerical grading on a scale of 1-9. This year’s examination results will show a mix of letters and numbers.

Meanwhile, in the Sixth Form, the return to a linear, one-take system of terminal A Levels is triggering a major recalibration. Our teaching and learning culture needs to adapt to this. We no longer have the fall-back of re-sits. We have worked hard this year to apply the learning from the first cycle of new style A Levels. Our outcomes and destinations remain excellent and we look forward to August with confidence.

This year, we have developed our pastoral care systems which were rightly commended so heartily by the ISI inspection team, with a continuing focus on mental health and well-being, as well as work on tolerance, respect and inclusion.

Experts have delivered hard-hitting and pragmatic sessions on the perils of substance misuse, healthy eating and nutrition, and on how to navigate the digital universe. We have also tackled challenging areas to do with consent, sexual health and gender equality.

We are preparing our children for a fluid and rapidly changing world that will require them to think globally and be adaptive. Our specialist careers team has delivered over 40 different events this academic year and hosted more than 70 visiting expert speakers. They have conducted more than 240 individual progress interviews with Fifth and Lower Sixth Form pupils.

A quick read of the monthly careers newsletter conveys the diversity of the programme which promotes a wide range of possible futures from degree apprenticeships, to gap year projects and higher education destinations in the UK and across the world. University remains the most popular choice but the palette of options is more colourful than ever.

With 114 upper sixth pupils holding Russell Group offers, of which ten are for Oxford or Cambridge, our upper sixth leavers have put themselves in a very strong position. Six pupils have secured vet or medicine offers, two for conservatoires and one pupil will begin pilot flight training. We wish them the results they have worked for, and bright futures to follow.

As well as looking forward to the future, our service today is one of commemoration. This occasion offers us an opportunity to pause and reflect on the long history of our school in this, our thirteen hundred and ninety-first year.

Looking back 100 years, the 1918 Education Reform Act raised the school leaving age from thirteen to fourteen. Hard to imagine leaving school at such a young age now. In the same year, the 1918 Representation of the People Act gave women over the age of 30 the right to vote for the first time. The number of women eligible to vote leapt from zero to 8.4 million overnight. In York, the electoral list swelled to 37,603 of which 41 per cent were women. A further decade elapsed before full electoral equality was achieved. High profile media coverage of the gender pay gap, and sexual harassment, reminds us that we still have a way to go on gender parity and respect.

On a gloriously sunny day in May, we celebrated the 100th anniversary of The Rise boarding house. OPs from the days when The Rise was a boys’ boarding house mingled with the current girl boarders and those first female pupils to join the school in the 1970s and 80s. Amongst other things, it was a celebration of the advent of co-education at St Peter’s. As an established co-educational school, it is important to mark such a milestone, and to ensure that we are educating our boys and girls to be men and women who cherish and enact values of respect, tolerance and inclusivity.

This day 100 years ago, the Great War, Wolrd War 1, was moving towards its grim conclusion. 18 Old Peterites were killed in action during 1918. The youngest, Eustace William Harland, was 18 years

old. The eldest, Lt Colonel Edward Cadman, was 43. The spread of ages, ranks and fighting units, locations – the Somme, Ypres, East Africa, Greece, Egypt, Berlin – these details amplify the profound reach and desperate wastefulness of war. We commemorate today all Old Peterites who gave their lives in conflicts. We remember all those who have lived lives of self-sacrifice in the service of others.

This year the school community suffered the loss of one of our longest-serving and best-loved characters: Marlene. Marlene Sandor was in her 40th year in the Catering Department at St Peter’s. News of her sudden death, whilst on holiday, came as a deep shock to the whole school community. Over the course of her extraordinary service to the School, Marlene became an institution. Loyal, cheerful, cheeky and warm-hearted, we commemorate Marlene today. Marlene was very much the spirit of the School. We have created a bursary fund in her name and, with a lovely picture of her in the servery, Marlene continues to smile on us as we pass through the dining hall day by day. We warmly welcome and thank Marlene’s husband, Karl, and daughter, Ann, who are here with us today.

We say thank you and farewell to a number of colleagues today. Mr Andrew Christian leaves us for an exciting SENCo role in North Wales. Mrs Alison Hutchinson retires after twelve years dedicated teaching in the Maths Department. Miss Cath Hempsall, an excellent history teacher, outdoorswoman and former Housemistress of Queen’s, and Miss Libby Ullstein, Head of Geography and former Housemistress of Hope, both leave for new adventures after energetic and diverse contributions during their time at the School.

Mark Christian, our Head of Digital Strategy, leaves for a leadership post at Sheffield Hallam University. Hannah Hamilton, Director of External Relations, moves on in August after seven years of outstanding senior leadership to head up a large team at Stamford Endowed Schools. Finally, we say goodbye and farewell to Mr Mike Johnston – ‘Jonners’. An Old Peterite himself, Mike has taught PE and Games for over 20 years. An outstanding sports coach with a shrewd pastoral eye, we thank Mike for his long service. I suspect you’ll have gathered that I’m off too! After eight happy years as Head Master, I hand on the torch to Mr Jeremy Walker, a fellow theologian, who is currently Principal of The King’s School in Rochester, an institution which roguishly claims to be even older than St Peter’s School!

I am certain that Jeremy will do a wonderful job. I wish him every happiness in the role – and good luck in pursuing that saintly benchmark set by our predecessors. Jeremy will take over in January 2019. In the intervening term, our Senior Deputy Head Dr Alastair Dunn will ably hold the fort.

As I say a fond farewell, I would like to thank all my colleagues, particularly the senior leadership team, for their loyal support, wise counsel and unerring commitment to giving our pupils the best possible experience.

Above all, I would like to thank my family, and in particular my wife. During her time in York, Jules has held demanding roles, caring for children and young adults at Martin House and working as an oncology doctor at York Hospital. She has also been deeply honoured to serve as a lay canon at the Minster for almost seven years. Somehow, she has also managed to look after me, and our children too.

Some of you may know that my father was Head Master of Uppingham School, in the tiny Midlands county of Rutland. He told me once that he had received a post card from a former pupil. It was a photo of Parkhurst Prison – a notorious penitentiary on the Isle of Wight. The cheeky wag, his erstwhile tutee, had written a simple message on the back of the post card. It read:

“Dear Dr Winkley. Wish you were here”. It was a playful joke, inspired by the fact that my father never took himself too seriously, and was most happy and at home when making idle banter with the pupils in his care. What we might call, ‘serious fun’.

In these earnest days of compliance, regulation, accountability and performance tables it is easy to lose sight of the real joy of education. Our vision dims and blurs as we deal with immediate pressures and tasks. We need clear vision to see things as they really

are; to prepare our minds for action. Of course, results matter. This is a competitive world, after all.

But, in my educational heart, you will find a passion for values education: an education of character and personal development. School is about nurturing and guiding young people in how to live a good life. Our school is a ‘both-and’ school, wherein the best results arise as a by-product of something deeper. Results come from communities of energy, participation, enjoyment.

When asked for his highlight of the academic year, one of my colleagues wrote: “For me the best part of the job remains the everyday interaction with our sparky, questioning, intelligent, curious young people in the classroom and around the school – which is as it should be. Sometimes the highlights aren’t always the highlights but the bread and butter.” Brown bread of course.

The reason that we work in schools is because we love being with children. Schools are about trying new things and striving for excellence in our chosen fields. They are about discovering meaning and finding our own ways of being happy. But most of all, they are about love.

In a school as ancient as this, in a city as long in history as York, we are all passing through. We stand on the shoulders of giants and see what we can see for the time that we are around. Head Masters are nothing more than custodians; caretakers. Or, rather, we are nothing less than caretakers. For taking care of children is surely the highest honour and joy that life can give.

It has been a pleasure and a privilege to take care of St Peter’s School. To see 1,000 children grow up in front of my eyes, and leave the school. I would like to thanks all the parents in this place for trusting St Peter’s School with your children.

Thank you for letting me be your Head Master.

In closing, I would like to say thank you to the pupils for animating our school with such energy and spirit. Warm thanks to the teaching and support staff for the willing hard work this year. Thank you all for the support and kindness that you have shown me and my family during our happy time in York. Our three children have enjoyed and thrived on eight years of a St Peter’s education: a precious gift which they will always carry with them.

So, finally, to today’s leavers: our upper sixth, who will set forth through those mighty West Doors into the next phase of their lives. I hope that each of you goes cheerfully over the ancient ways. Travel with hope in your heart. Take with you the values, the friendships and the learning of your time at St Peter’s School. And, remember - wherever you are in the world – whatever day of the week it is - brown is good.

Mr Leo Winkley Head Master