Speech Day at This Time of Year?

The Master has to give six speeches on the Induction Day as he speaks to new pupils entering the Lower School, the Removes and the VIth, and separately, to their parents. It was like Speech Day in another respect as well - it poured with rain in the afternoon. Having one to join LS and one to go into the Removes we were flitting from one end of the school to the other. (Though we only went to one of the speeches!)

Parents of new Removes have lunch in Big School

In the speech we heard, the Master spoke of how the new pupils may well find themselves forging life long friendships and associations. The day is largely put together by the Haileybury Parents Association, whose reps put in a vast amount of work; but the Haileybury Society's role is to help to foster those life long links for those who have moved on.

Silence Exams!

An examination is always to be feared, for the greatest fool can ask more than the wisest man can answer.

Today is the day of the entrance exams for the lower school and number three son will be sitting his first examinations at Haileybury. The scholarship candidates have been doing their tests on Thursday and Friday. 

I am a great believer in exams. The life skills of being able to marshal the information that you know and bring it to a point and to answer the question which has been set is one which we come across time and time again. Coursework cannot cannot prepare you for the child who says "Well, if God made the world who made God?"

Having said that it is surely true that our children are over examined in today's English educational systems. One of the great attractions of I B is the linear course. That is, that the exams come at the end, just like sitting finals. This is a great attraction to my mind as it allows scope for young people to be able to explore a subject while preparing for the test which comes at the end.

However that may be, good luck to all those who are sitting for the entrance exams this time round.

Seven minute (half) mile

It is all the fault of a tree. A rather magnificent tree, but a tree which the Hertfordshire planning officers said could not be felled. It rises majestically from the clutter of huts and garages which deface the area between College Road and the kitchens, and it prevented the Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) block being built there. Even a design which would have curved round the tree was rejected as the footings would have disturbed its roots.

This living but stationary obstacle has thus required of the smallest members of the Haileybury community that they learn to scuttle about as quickly as the squirrels who leap about in the branches. If the time-table with imperious command requires them to zoom from Lower School to French or Spanish, the regulation five minutes between lessons seems hardly enough. 

Last week the new Head of Lower School spent a morning shadowing a class, being a pupil for a day. My Lower School spy was ecstatic. "She believes us - it isn't long enough! We will get seven minutes between lessons." We shall see. If they do, it is the fault of a tree.

The Evolution of Dormitories 4

The movement over the last twenty years has been to smaller and smaller dormitories for younger pupils and to bed sits for the more senior. The pattern has been to have a 'dormitory' for Removes and Middles and study bedrooms for Vths and above. When the school became co-educational the new Bartle Frere and Edmonstone were set up in this way. Colvin and Melvill meanwhile were equipped with single rooms throughout. Hailey has a dormitory (the old Upper) but the Lower was divided into rooms for four girls each. This is similar to what was done in Allenby when the conversion was made. That pattern has recently been replicated in Trevelyan and Thomason where the Removes and Middles live and work in rooms of four. (Four is a pastorally good number as it reduces the chances of a two on one division happening in a room.)

Meanwhile the new Lower School boys' accommodation in Highfield is in Dormitories of eight.  The Lower School girls' dormitory is in Alban's and while it has great character it is not as swish as the boys' rooms.

Many of the boys' houses have clever bunks in a "T" shape where the top bunk is at right angles to the bottom one and supported at either end by wardrobes.

How Time Flies

A lovely warm summer evening tonight for the Lower School end of term chapel service and BBQ. The Lower School choir sang Rutter's The Lord bless you and keep you, and the congregation sang heartily. Afterwards as the young people spread out across Terrace playing all sorts of games and the adults fell on the food we were all saying that it really does not seem a year since the welcome day and the first day of term in September. Of course the thing is that it is not a year - only three quarters of one, term actually has a couple of weeks to go, and the long summer holiday lies ahead. It certainly seems only a short time to me since we were dropping our eldest, now about to leave LS2, for the beginning of his first year.

There were goodbyes as well, to Chris Jones, the Head of Lower School, who is leaving to be Deputy Head at Churcher's College in Hampshire. His contribution to the development in Lower School was warmly acknowledged both in Chapel and afterwards. In addition Richard Charters, one of the LS tutors, is off to Colombia. Good luck to them both.