Boarding School - Royal Alexandra and Albert School

It is a pleasure to welcome you all, my colleagues - both teaching and non-teaching - pupils and parents as well as Governors, members of the Board of Management and guests, particularly our Mayor, Councillor Frances Dixon, who is here on one of her last engagements as Mayor and as a Councillor.

I am also particularly pleased to be able to welcome our Visitor for this Founders' Day, Mr Andrew Boggis, Warden of Forest School and this year's Chairman of HMC - The Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference - and Fiona his wife. Mr Boggis is Chairman of the association which represents this country's leading Independent Schools, and it is most appropriate that he should be our speaker today - for reasons that should become clear.

So, today, I want to talk today about three things. How the school is developing, volunteers and finally I want to tell you about the progress of four particular pupils.

The first week of this term the inspector visited. Not a dreaded Ofsted hit squad but one solitary man trying to find the answer to a question. The Institute of Education in London has identified this school as one of the schools in England that has made the most significant, sustained improvement over the last five years. That inspector, or perhaps more accurately that researcher, was trying to identify what contributed to our significant, sustained improvement. The logic is simple. He identifies the common factors among such successful schools; every school then has the key to success.

At the end of his week here I asked the researcher what he had found. What are the factors that create sustained improvement and success ? And he told me to wait until September when his research is published !

But I can predict, and I am sure Mr Boggis can predict with similar confidence, that the important factors are hard-working, professional teachers who are determined that their pupils will progress as far and as fast as their individual ability allows and those teachers are supported by Heads of Department, Heads of Year or Key Stage, Housemasters and Housemistresses, and Deputy Heads whose focus is fixed on the achievement of each individual. That is a picture I recognise of my very hard-working colleagues and I invite pupils and parents to join me in thanking them for their work.

Last September we became a Sports College and I congratulate Mr Daly, Director of Sport, Mr Halstead, Mr Hothersall and Mr Bendall for the work they put into writing the seventy or so pages of paperwork that were judged to be an excellent bid for Sports College status. Another element of a good school that I am sure Mr Boggis and I agree on is that a school should provide a variety of team and individual sporting activities to give many pupils a taste of success and to plant in them the love of a healthy lifestyle which will have benefits for years to come. I would particularly like to mention a number of successes:
Kola Adedoyin who is already ranked third in the country for Under 17 triple jump, even though he will still be competing in that age group in 2007.
The group of Year 10 and 11 girls who have, as part of their Junior Sports Leaders Award, been running Orienteering sessions for pupils at Woodfield School, a Special School
The Year 8 Rugby Squad which went on tour to Ireland earlier this year, which won eleven of its 16 fixtures and which came close to qualifying in their group in the Rosslyn Park Sevens.
And our riders who have been building up an impressive collection of rosettes in local competitions.
Sport is part of our success.

The Arts. Again, I suspect that Mr Boggis would agree that a successful school is one which encourages pupils to make music and to perform on stage, which helps young people build up their self confidence and gives them an interest which may stay with them through the rest of their lives. The Spring Concert, which attracted a huge audience of pupils, parents and staff into this seven-hundred seat Chapel was a notable success. Many pupils have performed with great success in the Reigate and Redhill Music Festival this week. We had a challenging school drama production last term and Madeleine Castrey, who is not the tallest or the oldest pupil in the Junior department as you will see later on when she receives a prize, has now been cast in the West End Revival of the Andrew Lloyd Weber Musical Evita.
And again the Arts are part of the key to our success.

What else ? All Headmasters eventually talk about buildings. So here is my "buildings bit". After this Prizegiving you are invited to drinks in the Performing Arts Centre. We are now more than half way towards the creation of a fully-equipped, air-conditioned, four-hundred seater theatre with retractable tiered seating and a full equipped stage. There are also a number of building sites within the school: The covered, floodlit sports area between the Sports Hall and the Main School building is nearing completion. Three classrooms are being built and these will significantly improve our Junior Department. Next Autumn and Winter our riders will have the benefit of a new indoor riding school and this Summer we are undertaking a major refurbishment of Gatton Hall, the last boarding house to be upgraded.

So how is the school developing ? As you have just heard, we are developing the facilities that are absolutely necessary for a boarding school in the twenty-first century. And nowadays schools need to have really good facilities. By September the last of our boarding houses will have been refurbished and brought up to the standard that our pupils rightfully expect. And we need to give them more grass pitches, perhaps a decent athletics track and certainly the floodlit Astroturf pitch. We also need to upgrade a number of classrooms and laboratories as well as extending our boarding houses to cope with the demand that we have for boarding and day boarding places.

So how do I see the future of this school ? What will we look like in five years time ?

We must never become too big. One factor in our success is the fact that we concentrate on individual pupils - and that is not possible beyond a certain number.

A hundred and fifty seems a sensible number for our Junior Department and that is where we currently are. I believe our Secondary Department needs to expand from the current five hundred pupils to something over six hundred - not least because Surrey tells me that the minimum number of pupils for a viable secondary school is over six hundred. And then there is our Sixth Form. We are currently limited to under fifty Sixth Formers, but I would like to see us move towards a hundred and fifty Sixth Formers as the success that we have up to GCSE spreads to the Sixth Form.

Those of you who are good at Maths will have calculated that this would move this school from a current pupil population of around seven hundred to a figure of nine hundred and something, of whom a majority would be boarders, and with the vast majority of the expansion being on the boarding side.

Mr Boggis and I both have Boards of Governors. They are all unpaid volunteers. They do their work to help the school, and to help the community.

And they have not been enticed to do the job with offers of knighthoods or peerages - as far as I am aware !

But believe you me, they do a real job.

I calculate that our Governors and Members of the Board of Management put in, between them, around five hundred hours of working time in meetings per year and that does not count preparation time for meetings. And they bring skills and expertise to the school which would cost a great deal if we had to pay from them at the market rate. At this point I was going to pay tribute to Adrian Smart who has very recently stepped down after almost six years as Chairman of the Board of Management. However, Adrian has profited from his new found freedom to take a short holiday in Cornwall. I dread to think how many hours he has spent working for the benefit of the school, and we owe him a debt of gratitude.

Schools also have paid volunteers. Paid volunteers ? Let me explain. We have a dedicated team of teaching and non-teaching staff, all with their vital jobs to do. But they do more. Minibuses do not drive themselves and teaching and boarding colleagues spend hours taking trips here and there, ferrying people to plays, field trips and many activities which enhance the education of our young people but which are not part of their contracted duties. And at this point I would like to pay a personal tribute to Mrs Sally Herrtage, my PA, without whose efficiency none of us would have been invited today and who has been here since early this morning making sure that everything is in order. It is this professionalism, this cheerful giving of extra time which, I am sure Mr Boggis will agree, is what makes a school, independent or state, a good school. I think that we should thank our volunteers for the work that they do,

Now, I told you that I would talk about four particular pupils. But which ones ? I detect some nervousness. Well the young people I wish to talk about are called Aubrey, Wilson, Norman and Mary. They are all either 5 or 6 years old. It is difficult to be precise about their ages. They all started off their lives in an orphanage: The Open Arms Infant Home in Blantyre, Malawi and now live in "Rose's House". This is an ordinary house where the four children live in the care of a foster family. As state education in Malawi has pretty much collapsed, the pupils of this school have pledged to finance these four orphans through their education at private schools. They are currently at Lady Bird School - an old fashioned private Primary school in Blantyre, Malawi. The Headmistress, Mrs Jaffu, has actually provided copies of their school reports for us.

In addition to continuing to finance these four children through their education, we are also raising money to provide sports equipment for the young people of the neighbourhood where Aubrey, Wilson, Norman and Mary live.

This means that we need to fundraise not just once but every year in order to give these children the best possible start in life which has not been kind to them from the start. We reached the necessary sum last year and will need to raise more this year. Pupils have undertaken a number of fundraising activities and you will find them asking for donations when you go for lunch or afterwards when you are invited to see the new Performing Arts Centre and have some refreshments.

So the final element of a successful school is one which is a benefit to its community. For a boarding school community is not only Reigate and Banstead, and the family of schools with whom we work as part of our Sports College initiative, or the Reigate and Redhill Music Festival which held the Choirs competition in this Chapel last Tuesday, but more far flung communities including that small group of orphans in Malawi.

I said I would tell you how the school is developing. I think the answer is that the prize winners sitting here have not only achieved excellence for which they are about to be given medals, but they have also done so much more - as you have heard - and what they, the pupils do is what makes this a school of which we can all be proud.