Well ladies and gentlemen, honoured guests and boys and girls this is a real privilege; even though we couldn’t fit everyone in we are here in force, at last. At least it’s not a pandemic that is preventing a full-on Prize Giving this year. Instead Grayson Perry has taken precedence so I guess that we should cut an artist of his calibre a little slack.
We meet this afternoon still feeling the aftershocks from the death of Queen Elizabeth. Our assemblies in school have emphasised for our school community the legacy of our queen and the importance of what has happened over the past two weeks, but still it feels as though the wheels of fate and fortune are turning around us. Just a matter of days ago the country came to a standstill to honour our Head of State. Here we are now moving into a new era with a new King, a new Prime Minister and a world that is different. None of those pieces of history could have been foretold at this event a year ago; such is the way of a turbulent world.
This is the first ‘full’ prizegiving post Covid; now that the virus has become a more routine part of life I want to spend a little time exploring the metamorphosis that Bishop’s has undergone over the past two years. I will outline some of the principal effects and then go on to look at what the immediate future may hold too. There is no doubt that we are on the edge of a very exciting period of development, of building for the decade to come. The last academic year represent the end of a planned period of growth for the school. This was long in the planning; the move to five forms of entry was first mooted in 2015, with Ward House appearing in Years 7 and 12 in 2017. Since then a demographic tidal wave of modest proportions has moved remorselessly upward through the BWS population pyramid, finally reaching Year 11 in the academic year just past, so that there are (give or take) 800 students aged 11-16 at Bishop’s. A quick check back through the records shows that in 2002-2003, my first year as Head, the number of boys (yes, just boys!) in the whole school was 807, demonstrating the transformation since then. This growth has been achieved without compromising the academic standard of our intake, the threshold for entry has remained essentially unchanged over those two decades.
There has also been even more dramatic, and faster, growth in the number of post-16 students. The decision to move to a co-educational sixth form was taken in 2019, with our first girls joining Year 12 in 2020, mid-pandemic. We have been on a rising wave of popularity ever since, assisted by digital and face to face recruitment over a wide area and powered by quality, results and reputation. Our entry standards have risen through time as the numbers joining Year 12 have climbed, and they are set to rise still further, so that the students who join us are a very impressive collective of young men and women . My staff have worked really hard to make things exceptional for our students, irrespective of gender, and I have been absolutely delighted with the outcomes. Even through the trials and restrictions posed by Covid, my staff have done their utmost to ensure that boys and girls have a fantastic experience while they are with us. And, by and large, they have. Our students have arrived from across Wiltshire, Hampshire and Dorset ready to do the business. They have had a lot of fun, they have worked as a team, they have delivered the results and we can all be very proud of what has been created by working together. Something very special has been created at the heart of Salisbury as a result.
The lifeblood of a school of the calibre of Bishop’s lies inevitably in the realm of exam performance, and 2022 was of course the first year where we had a return to a summer exam season. Because of the circumstances I was a little unsure about the how our boys and girls would perform. There was more uncertainty than pre-Covid, due to the relative inexperience of the exam candidates and also the manipulation of data at a national level. My worries evaporated in August; when the results arrived it was immediately apparent that Bishop’s students had delivered very strong grades at both GCSE and A level; at both levels the outcomes were very similar to the previous year. The difference is that in 2022 there was no ‘benefit of the doubt’ factor that was so prevalent elsewhere, causing double digit drops in headline figures at many other schools, both state funded and private. I was delighted, for the students first and foremost, but I also feel that the results were an emphatic endorsement for all of my colleagues. No recitation of stats from me as it’s not needed – just congratulations on a highly professional job very well done carried through.
Now that the epidemic has ebbed we can start to get an objective view of what the impacts of Covid have been on a national scale. Research from the Education Employment Foundation suggests that there are significant gaps in attainment that have opened up especially in Key Stages 1 and 3, and these will need to be worked on in future years. Our experience at Bishop’s suggests that though there may be gaps they are small, mainly due to the swift move to online learning here– but of course children will be joining us over the next two years who have had a less effective learning experience. That will need to be sorted, and the Heads of Academic Departments are well aware of the need for vigilance and extra support where this is needed.
In some ways, the effects of the pandemic on the non-academic side of school life was more profound. It was always going to be this way, because Bishop’s is about so much more than merely exams. The waves of infection, isolation and the collapse of social infrastructure meant that what we understand and take for granted at Bishop’s simply stopped. People are talking about reconstruction of what we had, but because of the profound changes that this school has been through over the past two years we are actually building anew and establishing fresh social capital. Traditions have of course continued, but we are doing lots of things rather differently with some of the changes driven by innovation from our fantastic students.
The pages of your programme show how much we have done to bring the school back, but also shows how much there remains to do in the coming years. Our music has undergone a resurgence under Lewis Edney and his colleagues, with orchestral work, groups and singing all strong together with some really exciting collaborative concerts the like of which I have not seen before in 20 years as Head. The spectacular Choral Concert at Wilton will live long in the memory, and there will be yet another joint Evensong at St Peter’s, Oxford next week. The sport under Richard Demain-Griffiths has once again become a phenomenon in scale and complexity, with a wider focus than ever before as girls’ sport has flourished and boys’ sport has broadened. Elite sport is as strong as ever, but just as importantly levels of participation are very high too. Mel Gordon is recruiting the cast and crew for the main school play production this autumn. BWS Adventure under James Oldham has expanded, with record numbers enrolling and succeeding in Duke of Edinburgh at all levels, our Ten Tors Teams taming Dartmoor in the Spring and adventurous activities now present for every year group. We have returned to overseas trips with the Rugby Tour to Canada and the linguists sampling Barcelona this summer, and there’s much more to come as the current academic year progresses. The House system has also resurrected in earnest now that cross age group assemblies and competitions are possible, and the influence of the House System is re-growing fast as the prefects give it impetus and drive.
All of this is hugely important as we seek to build back coherence and identity. We are diminished if teamwork is absent of course, but just as important is Stella Wood’s work to build a sense of togetherness and celebration of faith through collective worship. Our routines for collective worship have evolved through more flexible use of the School Chapel and more use of this amazing space here in the Cathedral. We celebrate being together more often; we all need time, both students and staff, to think about what we are doing and why. We need time outside the busyness of the daily routine to get a grip on the bigger ideas and make sense of a world that seems full of uncertainty. Our Chaplain is helping us all to do just that as we climb back to a new normality.
I was writing this whilst watching the funeral processions through London and Windsor on Bank Holiday Monday. Those extraordinary scenes, unparalleled in my lifetime, signal a change for our country as we move from a long period of stability towards something new. The curtain has fallen on the second Elizabethan Age and a new landscape lies before us. Despite the obvious turbulence that is to come nationally we are at the start of a very exciting period of development as we maximise the opportunities of a bigger school, more robust finances and the prospect in the short term of a further phase of building development. Those metaphorical (and perhaps proverbial) sunlit uplands may not quite be in view but the current year should be a very exciting one for us all as we build momentum further for the future.
SDS
