Boarding School - Royal Alexandra and Albert School

It is a pleasure to welcome you all, and I am particularly glad to see both Councillor Mrs Marion Brewster, Mayor of Reigate and Banstead, and Councillor Mrs Sheila Gruselle, Chairman of Surrey County Council.

It is most appropriate that Mrs Gruselle is our visitor today. Many people forget that Surrey County Council provides finance for the 8.30 am to 3.30 pm part of what goes on here, and so it is right that the Chairman should see and hear for herself what has been done with that money. - and perhaps what we could do with a little more !

Well, Mrs Gruselle, this is what the nice man from Ofsted wrote:
Good teaching and learning ensures that pupils achieve well and leave the school at the end of Year 11 with better results than might be expected from standards at entry.
The school has a very good ethos that promotes high expectations of work and behaviour and leads to a productive learning environment.
The personal development of the pupils is very good; pupils' confidence and self-esteem rise well as they progress through the school; relationships are very good.
The pastoral care of pupils is very good, and helps to promote good achievement.
Provision for pupils who board is very good; arrangements for pupils' care and welfare are excellent.

I hope you will agree that we are using our money to good effect, and I wish at this point publicly to thank the staff, teaching and non-teaching, whose work was recognised in such a positive Ofsted report and those pupils and teachers whose efforts made us 15th most improved Primary School in England and 27th highest performing comprehensive school in England. Well done colleagues and thank you all.

I want to talk today about three things. Small Schools, our Foundation and its role and, lastly, the future and what it holds for Royal Alexandra and Albert School.

So. Small Schools.
The Department for Education decided recently that it wanted to know why small schools are usually successful and generally popular with pupils and parents. So they organised a two-day meeting for Heads of small secondary schools. I went. The first thing that happened was that each Head described their school and the number of pupils they had. I was thrilled to discover that we are the biggest small school in England !

We spent some time discussing what it is about small schools that people like, and decided, in the end, that it is not just about being small. It is about operating on a human scale and, most importantly, having an attitude which says "We want every single person to get the best that they can out of what we offer".

If a school genuinely cares about this, and when I say "a school" I mean all the staff, then it does not really matter if we are the biggest small school or the smallest medium-sized school. Over the last three years we have expanded by about a hundred pupils and the smallest school at that conference was an 11-16 comprehensive with only 52 pupils on roll. But I believe that the feel of this school has not changed as we have expanded. The staff actually cares. Perhaps it is easier to care if average class sizes are a little lower, if there are only 150 pupils in the Junior department; and 80, 90 or 100 pupils in a secondary year group, but any school where that attitude and that dedication is missing feels very different. I am pleased to see many retired members of staff here in Chapel today. Again, this is evidence that they cared when they worked here.

This does not mean that everything can or will be perfect in a school where the staff have this attitude. Shirts will not always be tucked in and some ties may be worn half way down here. Some girls will sometimes try wearing too much make up. These are battles that all schools face every term in one manner or another. I remember my Housemaster saying "Spencer Ellis: you are a long-haired layabout". Well OK, I might have been a trifle lazy.... But just because I managed to grow my hair long enough to go over my ears...
Different generation, same battle.

I believe this school needs to continue to expand, and we should think seriously about having our own Sixth Form here on site - and perhaps I wouldn't be invited to meeting for Heads of small schools any longer - but as long as we are lucky enough to have a hard-working staff who embrace the ethos I have described, then we will continue to offer what people want from a small school.

Our Foundation. This is the Royal Alexandra and Albert School Act of Parliament of 1949. It is not a great read. And it makes quite simple things pretty complicated. I quote: "The Albert School means the charity now known as the Royal Albert School" or even better "The 1912 deed poll means a deed poll dated the fourteenth of August 1912"

But there is one vital sentence. It talks about "boys and girls who are without one or both parents or whose special circumstances make it desirable that they should go to a boarding school". This was the original function of the Foundation - to run what today we would call a children's' home. That is why we have become a boarding school.

Today, of course, the vast majority of boarders are financed by their parents, but we do have a number of Foundationers, financed by the Charitable Foundation. We still maintain the original aim of our Founders: to offer a good boarding education to young people who need and deserve it.

There has been a lot of nonsense in the press recently about boarding schools being the right place to sort out difficult children. This is a complete misunderstanding. Foundationers are not difficult children. They are children whose lives have encountered difficulties. We should be proud that this school has a Foundation which can provide money, from its limited investments, to help them. I am also very grateful to the Board of Management of the Foundation which has provided the funding for 12 new Foundationer places next September.

The Foundation provides Foundationer places in the school here. The pupils and staff are planning to raise money to provide places in orphanages and boarding schools in Third World Countries. Exactly the same idea. This is not a one-off charity fund-raiser. The school community will fund a small number of children through their education, providing sustained support each year to give those children the best possible start in life. It has always been our tradition to offer lunch to our visitors, parents and Old Scholars, in the Dining Hall on Founders' Day. I want to inaugurate an extra tradition. We do not charge for this lunch. It will continue to be provided freely. However, there will be pupils in the Dining Hall asking for your donation towards this charitable cause. Enjoy your lunch.

Small Schools. The Foundation. The future.

We raised around £50,000 from various sponsors, including our Patron, Her Majesty The Queen, and we wrote an 80 page application for Sports College status. We sent it off. We have had a visit a couple of weeks ago from an assessor who spent four hours asking questions and visiting the PE and Games facilities. This is the worrying time. It is like waiting for exam results. We know that the decision will be announced for this school, and for all schools who have applied for Specialist School status, at the end of June. Incidentally, Surrey were a great support to us. There is a coherent county plan for Specialist Schools and we were encouraged by Surrey to apply as it suits the ethos of the school and Surrey would like a Sports College in Reigate and Banstead.

Provided we are successful, this will give us a large covered play area next to the Sports Hall, a new pavilion down on the park and a new, indoor Riding School. But becoming a Sports College is about more than extra sports facilities. It is about raising attainment across the board as well as giving young people a healthy lifestyle.

This Summer, workmen will take over Rank and Weston - the Junior Boarding Houses. In fact they have been working there on some small parts of the job since last Autumn. In September the contractors will be half a million pounds better off and we will have a primary boarding set up, with really good facilities for the day boarders as well, which will rival the seven secondary houses.

The first and vital part of all development is finding the money. The government recently announced the creation of a system for state boarding schools to apply for capital grants to develop their boarding. You will not be surprised to know that we have almost finished writing a bid for a lot of money to improve the boarding in Gatton Hall: the last big refurbishment job that remains within boarding.

My least favourite room in the whole school is that horrid, lime-green gymnasium with its old-fashioned wall bars. Converting this into a modern, air-conditioned Theatre with tiered seating for an audience of 400 to enjoy good sight lines, and a proper sound system and lighting rig for the re-fitted stage will cost a little under £200,000. The first phase of this work will be completed by September, thanks to a generous £50,000 grant from the Humphrey Richardson Taylor Charitable Trust and with a lot of the building work being carried out by our in-house Maintenance Team. We are currently approaching a number of charities to finance phase two of the work, which is the equipping of the stage. The date for that work will depend on how soon the finance becomes available.

And what else ? Mrs Salman keeps telling me she needs new classrooms for Juniors. So does the Modern Languages Department. The "Weights Room", as we call it, needs to be replaced. We need more flat grass pitches in the area round this lovely Chapel. The tennis courts in front of Gatton Hall are well past their sell-by date, and they ruin the view. Two of the Science labs really do need refurbishing -Ofsted says so as well. We want computers in all boarding houses - and a little birdie tells me that this may happen at some point in the relatively near future. There are still corridors to be repainted and re-carpeted in the school and our Senior Riding Instructor says that she wants more ponies. We are the only secondary school in the Borough of Reigate and Banstead, and one of only a handful in Surrey, without an all-weather pitch, preferably floodlit. Lots of money to spend !

But let us remember what has been done in the past few years. £2.6 million pounds on refurbishing seven secondary boarding houses. A new Music Department. New car parks, footpaths and fencing. Traffic barriers and CCTV. Extra housing for resident staff. A computer suite in Design-Technology. A computer room upstairs in the New Block. A new Common Room for staff. The Park looks so much better with the Serpentine and Engine Pond lake drained and cleared. New changing rooms, showers and toilets in the main school building. Half a million pounds spent on the Dining Hall.

In the past few years, we have done much more than anyone ever imagined was possible. And we have no intention of slowing down, though I do not know how long it will take to accomplish everything we wish for.

Let me finish by talking about another aspect of this school's future - the youngest pupils in the school - Year 3.

They have been doing some work on poetry and the whole class combined to write a poem about the things they would do if it wasn't for Miss Franklin, their class teacher.

My Housemaster said I was a long-haired layabout. This is what our seven and eight year olds wrote that they would do if they did not have their teacher: