The Chronicle, Autumn 2018

8 ST EDWARD’S CHRONICLE

to a particular status or place in society. If we are doing our job, young people will leave with an acute awareness of their obligations to the wider world. Thirdly, we are unwavering in our commitment to broad academic entry. There are plenty of schools which set out to select only the most academically promising pupils. We fervently believe that age 13 is not the exclusive window during which academic promise displays itself. Our job is to encourage every pupil to perform above their expectations, to discover at any point in their Teddies career talents and passions they didn’t know they had and to display them in the classroom, in the recital room, on the sports field, on stage and in the exam hall. This is an outcome that every pupil and every parent at Teddies has a right to expect. To ensure that we deliver on this promise, we look for two qualities in the young people we select to join us. Will they be great contributors to our community and do the very best they can? And do they actively want us to help them achieve things inside and outside the classroom that they might never have believed possible? We are looking for ambition, energy and curiosity – not achievement.

Chris Jones OSE

Do these values set us apart from other schools? We cannot claim an exclusive right to any value. But I would say that the combination of our values and the intensity with which we believe and live them, makes Teddies distinctive.

What are your ambitions for the School? I said at Gaudy that Teddies is a place of strong and growing academic ambition; we have just begun to cast that ambition in stone, brick and glass. The Quad Development, the most ambitious project we have ever undertaken, is designed in every way to support the values I’ve just been talking about and will enable our pupils to gather together, think together, perform together, learn together and to study, both together and individually, in a world-class setting. Can you define a St Edward’s education? St Edward’s is right at the forefront of modern educational thinking. Over the past few years, the leadership team has developed an engaging, challenging and effective academic framework that explicitly teaches pupils how to take an active approach to their own learning. Discussion, debate, independent research and teamwork are now a big part of all our pupils’ lives. It is our intention that every pupil, whatever their ability, can discover the learning techniques that work best for them. The new facilities in the Quad Development will enable us to embed this culture of academic choice and opportunity ever more firmly into school life.

Izzy Wates and Aniella Weinberger tagging sheep at the Wolvercote Community Farm on school grounds.