President, Chairman, Governors, Headmaster, Headmistress, Parents and Guests -

The word legacy has been uppermost in the minds of some recently and as we reflect upon ten years of Mr T Blair the mind goes back to those famous words of 1997, Education, education, education. For those of us actually involved in education as opposed to talking about it, the past decade has seen such aspirations degenerate into Legislation, legislation, legislation. At one stage, diktats emanating from Westminster in this area were running at a staggering 580 per year. So paperwork has been very much part of the Blair legacy for we mere groundlings and much of my time is spent looking at this, seeing where and how it affects us, reading and writing reports and references.

As far as reports are concerned, however there is the consolation of a lighter side. Moving some of our Staff onto computerised reporting, for example, has not been straightforward. The wrong key pressed and the results can be alarming. For example, one report last year read:

I am assuming he meant to type the word Geography.

References, however, are a completely different matter. Here was one from a local primary school on a pupil about to join the Pre which I rather enjoyed:

As far as Staff references are concerned, freedom of information has encouraged many a referee to be somewhat cautious; this particular reference for a candidate whom I did not appoint is a masterpiece of subtlety:

Whilst an unfortunate inversion on another candidate was more to the point:

Reports. This year has seen the Pre subject to three reports following inspections from three different external bodies - CrestEd, who inspect Learning Support Centres, CSCI who look at boarding provision and boarding welfare, and ISI which inspects schools on behalf of OfSted. In all three cases - and you will be able to read these for yourselves shortly on the website – words such as excellent and outstanding were very much to the fore, and we cannot express this better than to read to you the opening lines of the ISI Report:

This is, of course, gratifying. Gratifying for you as parents because it confirms, I hope, for you the value that you are getting by making the considerable sacrifices which you have to make in order to send your children here and gratifying for the Staff since it confirms for them that the commitment, effort and dedication they apply to their jobs here is both recognised and valued. For what Inspections do, amongst other things, is to give, via detailed analysis and scrutiny, a considered overview of the overall quality of a school. I can stand up here, as I tend to do every year, and list the obvious successes - National Hockey Champions, Coronation Cup finalists, music of a quality that you will not find in any conventional prep school - this from a member of the public recently:

...art and drama of the highest standards as evinced by Godspell and the Summer Art Exhibition, academic results across the board which once again demonstrate the added value we give to the children here - but these are in the end mere pieces of the jigsaw. These three inspections dealt with the whole picture – academic, pastoral and spiritual - and the whole picture looks pretty good. Trumpet-blowing has never been the Pre’s way and has never been mine - my parents saw to that, "passable" being the only accolade my father applied and then sparingly - but all of us involved in the Clifton community - parents, staff and children - can be justifiably proud of this judgement and the challenge that now lies before us is not only to maintain these standards but develop them further.

So, as the saying goes, you’re only as good as your next report. There are several developments of which you need to be aware which are all part and parcel of our determination to move forward as a school and build on the foundations of excellence already laid. At the heart of a good school must lie the quality of teaching and learning. I will come back to teaching in a moment, but as far as learning is concerned, a crucial component of success in this area is resourcing. Over the past few years, we have poured cash into developing our classrooms and in particular into developing technology as an aid to improved learning whether this be language software, ICT facilities or interactive whiteboards, and there is no doubt that this has paid dividends. But in this digital age, it is all too easy to dismiss the importance of books and the importance of libraries. Leaving aside the arguments about the importance of spaces - Chapel and the Library being good examples - not everything is available on the internet and the internet can only complement a good library, not replace it. Research has shown that good, well-stocked, well-run libraries play a critical part in raising academic standards and, unlike the internet, they are stable. They also play a vital part in the sharing of research and ideas, increasingly important as we enter the age of increasing individual isolation. We have an excellent librarian, now we need an excellent library to complement her skills in particular, and our teaching standards in general, and I am delighted to be able to announce that this is precisely what we shall have by half-term next term and I am grateful to Council for allocating over £200,000 to this project. Continued investment in technology and the Library will ensure that Pre children will not only enjoy the facility to acquire knowledge but will also be helped in the equally important task of using and applying knowledge. Linked with this continued drive to develop children’s learning to even higher levels is the development of our curriculum to ensure that the 11-16 experience at Clifton is seamless and both intellectually and educationally meaningful. In an organisation as complex as Clifton, effective liaison between schools is not as easy to achieve as one might think. It has been suggested that to move to an 11-16 curriculum was hardly radical. I think it is for recent HMC research has indicated how poor Public Schools are at recognising what has gone on before in children’s learning prior to Year 9. Clifton is not content to be like other public schools and both Mr Moore and I are committed to ensuring that this is not happening here and we will achieve this by far greater conjunction of timetables and schemes of work so that the experience of children from Year 7 to Year 11 really does amount to more than just a series of box-ticking, hurdle-jumping exercises. And so to teaching. The ISI Report again:

And before the accountants amongst you start wondering about the other 1 out of 10, they were classified as satisfactory! This doesn’t happen by accident. Apart from the initiatives introduced by John Milne since his arrival here as Academic Deputy Head, most significant of which has been his development of Assessment for Learning across all academic departments, the evident quality of the teaching here is a testimony to the desire of the Staff to strive constantly to improve their own performance. A truly good Common Room is a humble place for the truly good teacher is a humble person, knowing himself or herself well and understanding that there is always more to be learnt about teaching, always more to be learnt about children, always more that can be undertaken and given, and that pupil improvement depends upon this. When I read the draft inspection report which talked about the quality of the staff and came up with judgements such as:

I felt genuinely humbled because this told me more than anything else about the real nature of the Staff in this school and I hope you will join me now in publicly recognising that this excellent set of inspection reports is very much their triumph and their reward.

And it is to some individual staff that we must now turn. Miss Gilmour leaves at he end of this term to explore her considerable linguistic talents in pastures new. We thank her for the two years she has given us and wish her well.

Another quote from the ISI report:

Mme Bartlett has piloted the growth and development of a very successful Modern Languages Department for over 20 years and now takes deserved retirement. Civilised, as only the French can be, always well-organised, she can look back on her career here with justifiable pride and I would now like her to come forward and accept a small and inadequate token which represents our genuine thanks for all that she has done in her time at this school.

A name from the past - well it is Commemoration - Mick Higgs. He once said to me, "If Annie Beavis reapplies for a job here, grab her with both hands." She did, and so did I - well, metaphorically speaking of course. Mrs Beavis takes early retirement at the end of this term to pursue other interests. She is an exceptional teacher - a quality not lost on the Inspectors when they were here - and the improvement in the SATs results over the past few years has been much down to her sheer classroom professionalism. Again, Annie, please come forward to receive this token of our appreciation and thanks.

One of the first knocks on our front door when we arrived at Clifton in 1993 was Victoria Newhouse. She pinned me to the wall - again metaphorically - and said, "Learning support in this school is a shambles - what are you going to do about it?" Well, she has always been one to take the direct route! A year later we opened the Coach House and ever since she has developed this resource into what is generally accepted as the best Special Needs Unit in Bristol. She has literally changed the lives of dozens of children. Again, the Inspection Report:

And in years to come these children will look back and realise how much they owe to her passionate commitment and belief that all children have value. This term marks her official retirement although I am delighted to say that she will return as a part-time member of the Coach House team which will be run jointly in September by Mrs Broadley and Mrs Palmer. It is thus only right to mark the occasion with this small presentation which barely reflects the enormous contribution she has made to life here.

Two other staff must be mentioned this morning. Yet again, the ISI Report:

Much of this is achieved by an incredibly strong and committed group of Housemasters and Housemistresses, two of which complete their tour of duty at the end of this term. Their dedication will be recognised no doubt by parents in due course, but I would just like to add my personal thanks to Mrs Barrett and Mr Hall for all they have done in South Town and North Town respectively. These two are true role models - caring, determined to maintain high standards, and intensely loyal.

Role models are plentiful these days - but the right role models are few and far between. Our Twelves this year have not disappointed in this respect in the example and attitude they have displayed and I would now like to ask our President, Professor Barron, to award them prizes in recognition of their contribution to the school’s ethos over the past year.

Really good schools are a long time in the making but can be quick in the breaking. It is tempting for us all now to sit back following the ISI Report and say "Job done - feet up". That would be a recipe for disaster because there is never any room for complacency when it comes to the education of the young because society and the demands it makes are ever changing and the whole and total well-being and development of your children depends upon us responding to and meeting these with vigour and determination. The Inspectors concluded their report with this:

And it is this aspect of a Pre education which I believe to be the most important, the most under attack at the moment, and the most worth defending.

Your children are under immense pressure. The world they live in is unrecognisable to that post-war society in which Jill and I enjoyed our childhood. And that growing pressure is coming from a variety of quarters and influences, and that growing pressure worries me enormously.

Pressure on your children comes partly from us as a school. The great strength of this school is its broad curriculum and its determination to add value to every child whether this be academic, athletic or aesthetic. But there is a price attached to this. The pace of life here is infinitely faster than when I first arrived here nearly 15 years ago and is incomparable to that experienced when I was at Prep school. That is why I am so determined to ensure that the 11-16 curriculum development we are undertaking succeeds so that we can remove some of the pressures on Years 7 and 8 and aim them in a far more measured way at GCSE rather than one intense examination at 13, preparation for which often distorts what we do and actively prevents us from following at an appropriate pace the more interesting avenues and by-ways that emerge from the learning process. That is why we wish to adjust the demands made upon our 8 year olds and I shall be writing to current Year 3 parents before the end of term to explain how we intend to do this. That is why we as a Staff are looking at the whole issue of homework with a view to making this experience wholesome and positive in terms of the development of their learning as opposed to adding to the pressure they are under unnecessarily. This was brought home to me forcefully last year by a conversation between a Housemaster and a Year 8 boy which went something like this:

And that is why I wish to ensure in the time left to me as Headmaster, that there is a balance between work and play, between academic achievement and authentic learning. Time to stand and stare, as the poet puts it, is in increasingly short supply. I believe that we have to do something about this if we are to help children to develop into emotionally and spiritually intelligent human beings. A large part of what we do here is the laying of foundations upon which these children’s lives will be built and this is an awesome responsibility which we have to shoulder. We cannot rest until we are convinced that those foundations are solid, deep and meaningful and the quest for this must represent the next stage in this school’s journey. This is not a new problem. Nineteenth Century romantic poets railed against loss of childhood in a growing industrial world founded on expediency –

Blake lamented in Songs if Innocence. "Children too old for fun, too young to face the future" thundered a recent Times headline. For all our so-called advances and sophistication since Blake’s age, we don’t appear to have moved far when it comes to joy either in general or in education.

As adults, therefore, pressure can be put on children as a result of our hopes and expectations. The growth of depression amongst the young in this Prozac age is one of the most worrying features of contemporary society, and believe me, schools like this are not immune from this. In an address to Staff, Mr Moore quoted a Headmaster addressing his parents nearly 30 years ago as follows:

The expectations we often unconsciously place upon our children can add to pressure on their young lives. And I use the word unconsciously deliberately and I speak as a parent. Looking back on my own children, I can see all too clearly how desire for them to succeed according to the cultural norms of my own up-bringing as well as those of society was often an unnecessary burden for them as they grew up - well, hindsight is always 20/20! But the key I think is this. Young children by and large more than anything else crave adult approval. It is the emotional rock upon which they begin to build their lives for such approval confirms their right to be. Parental love is, of course, unconditional. Adult approval, however, can all too easily reflect the wishes, hopes, frustrations and pressures that adults are subject to as a result of the consumerist society in which we all work. If we value success only in terms of material or computable achievement, then this will influence how we will express our approval. And if we are not careful, children will all too easily link success in this sense with approval and thus failure to be top of the class, get into the 1st team or win a prize starts to represent the threat of disapproval. We as adults may not mean to do this but it all too easily happens and those shades of the prison house really do begin to crowd in on the growing boy. As Libby Purves put it recently,

We may look down our noses at Eastern philosophy but I suspect we would all be happier with a healthy dose of Chinese Confucianism which interprets such things as simply trying hard enough is good enough whether or not you have tangible success.

We are the Hollow men, TS Eliot cried out in his prophetic poem over 80 years ago now. The drives to which we are all subject merely add to the pressure facing children today. Much of this lies at the root of an England which has become an icon for consumption. 10 year olds, apparently, can on average name about 40 different species of wild animal but over 400 brand names; 70% of 3 year olds recognise the MacDonalds logo for what it is. Engulfed with pressures to succeed, they are likewise swamped with images of how they should look and what they should own, and as they struggle with this remorseless pressure, so do rates of depression and low self-esteem rise. The boundaries between the adult world and the world of the child are disappearing. Size zero and six-pack stomachs drive children to strive for the image as opposed to the reality, and they are bound to be disappointed. Toys are deliberately aimed at this. The Bratz Secret Date Collection supplies the lucky owner with champagne glasses and "date night" accessories, the lucky owners being a target market of 6 year olds. Pole-dancing Barbie - I kid you not - is the latest addition to that range of doll and, what is more, young girls can log on to a Barbie webchat where the kind adult at the other end of the cable can advise them on which is the best Barbie for them. "Can children be children before they are consumers?" the Children’s Society has plaintively asked of late. The answer looks like NO. Just look at Fiji. Before 1995 with no television there were no recorded cases of anorexia or bulimia. By 1998, 11% of the young female population were suffering from these disorders. You don’t have to be a genius to draw the obvious conclusions.

The sad fact is that in this country learning is being more and more equated with earning. The Government drives this with its campaign to get 50% of the young to university on the logic that graduate pay is higher (never mind the drop-out rate, the irrelevance of some of the degree courses, the huge debt at the end, and no guarantee of graduate employment). Learning for cash rather than learning for learning’s sake is the main driver here. Small wonder the psychologist Oliver James fulminates:

For above all education properly conceived is not a consumer product to be bought, devoured and replaced by a newer, flashier model. Education is for life. It is a transformative human activity which cannot be measured in the number of lessons a child receives, the range of subjects he or she studies, or the number of matches a team wins. I went into teaching as a naïve 22 year old believing that education and schools could change society for the better. Over 35 years later all I see around me increasingly is education reflecting society, not changing it. Schools like Clifton, independent both in terms of curriculum and in terms of ethos, still have the opportunity to be transformative and it is a responsibility from which we should not hide and concerning which we must maintain our confidence. We all need to think of the education we give our children as not a product to be bought and consumed but as a process which addresses the mind, the heart and the spirit. In other words, a process that forms us as mature individuals and as people who live in relationship with others. Do we really need more and more children or young people who know how to play the testing games with which our system is obsessed and who increasingly measure their self-worth by such criteria? Do we really doubt that what we need instead are human beings who have the capacity to meet the extraordinary challenges and demands that lie before 21st Century civilisation because they are at ease with themselves and at ease with each other?

It takes a village to raise a child goes the African proverb. The whole of the social complex of which children are a part makes them the people they are and the people they become, and that is true whether we like it or not. When a culture or a society ignores or sidelines the question of what it actually wants to produce, what kind of human being it actually wants to nurture, when it adopts indifference to the outcome, it is still educating and shaping. And if the end result is not quite the sort of human being or society we would like to see in large numbers then it only has itself to blame.

If we carry on like this, hurrying children through hoops and hurrying children into adulthood, more and more out of our system will come young people who know a lot, but understand little, who achieve a lot but whose achievements merely stoke the boilers of self-image and consumerism, and who see privilege as a right rather than a responsibility. As the years roll past, our children here will not remember what we said, nor what we did; but they will certainly remember how we made them feel, and if we don’t get this right between us we shall have failed them because in spite of arming them with all the required bits of paper, we shall have failed to show them the possibility of being as opposed to mere having.

Tilting at windmills, Headmaster? Almost certainly but then history is always made by minorities and before the men in white coats arrive to cart me away we will continue to challenge the assumptions for the market place and speak up for a counter-culture of extended childhood, of play and learning for learning’s sake as the key to learning well, of the imperative of self-denial and genuine dialogue with those around us, of what is lasting and authentic as opposed to short-term and trivial. In other words, top of our list of priorities will continue to be the care about the quality of your children’s souls as we try to lift the veil on infinity and all its possibilities.

A parent cross with me for a sanction that had been applied to his child told me recently that it was about time I joined the real world. Well, he’s probably right and no doubt there are some here today who would agree with him, but if, to quote the Bob Dylan lyric, being out of step with reality means standing up for some lasting values, defending the right of your children to be children and enjoy the freedom that should go with childhood and trying to ensure that every child that passes through this College goes into that so-called real world a decent, upright, moral and emotionally intelligent human being who will play a part in transforming society rather than exploiting it, then perhaps, just perhaps, being out of step with reality may not, after all, be such a bad place to be.

Thank you for listening.