In school
Free minds Roland Martin celebrates imaginative and broad focussed learning at A level Out of all the educational initiatives, big and small, with which I have been involved, I’m probably most proud of the Free Minds programme that we have set up at City of London Freemen’s School. Freemen’s is a traditional school with a contemporary and forward-looking approach, something that reflects the personalities of previous and current school leaders at the school. Our motto is to lead, learn and make a difference. Nowhere is this more important than in the Sixth Form. We want our Sixth Formers to be articulate, knowledgeable, rational and tolerant of others’ viewpoints. We want them to be imaginative and not narrowly focussed in their learning. Not so long ago, a colleague was asked in a revision class by a student, ‘What should my personal opinion be?’ It is just this sort of over-reliance on an ex cathedra schoolmistress or master that we want to discourage.
With the move away from the AS qualification and a return to linear A levels, my Leadership Team and I wanted to come up with a programme of study that would not only inspire our students to learn for the sake of learning, by engaging the whole of their minds in a wide range of subjects, but also to make them more interesting company, not least in future social and business situations. In addition, we wanted to take advantage of the hitherto untapped academic strengths of our teaching staff, who between them hold over 100 different degrees in a wide range of disciplines. In short, I wanted them to be able to teach some of their ‘hobby horses’ – perhaps better expressed as passions – that have not been appearing on recent examination syllabuses. In my first teaching post I was Head of General Studies, to my mind a much-maligned A Level, so I had some idea of what I thought would work well, what was essentially missing from the City of London Freemen’s School
Autumn 2017
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