Destination Education
00:21:36 · Ruth Benny, Scott Crawford
[00:21:36] S0: It's about 90 out of three sixty four, [00:21:39] S1: I if I remember think we work quite hard so that the school doesn't feel like a particular part of the world is dominating and you can do that in the way in which you distribute the young people through houses and you think about where they come from and obviously backgrounds, do they come from UK preps, do they come from international schools and you want to have a mix. But we have 43 different nationalities represented in the College and that means that there is a great cultural texture to the school and the young people, quite without influence from the teachers, are keen to talk about their cultures and where they come from and their backgrounds, often through food. There is a wonderful exchange of cultural identity through their food and celebrating that. Obviously we have a pupil led DEI panel and they're thinking about initiatives and ways in which we can bring children together to talk about some of the more difficult issues that exist in geopolitics. And that works well. But what I see as I move through the school is 43 different nationalities living harmoniously together by dint of good pastoral care, shared interests and a rich programme. So it's great training I think for when they leave school and go off into the workplace, wherever that's going to be. So we do that naturally rather than having a heavy handed approach to delivering on DEI objectives, if that makes sense, as it emerges from the community.
00:23:18 · Ruth Benny, Scott Crawford
[00:23:18] S0: I suppose I also thought of asking that question because I'd also read that Lancing talks about quirky students and I didn't quite know what that meant. [00:23:27] S1: I think there's a long history of Lancing, if you go back in the archives of some of our alumni, of quirkiness and bending the rules and being inventive. We have a good history of satire within the school, you see it in the school magazine, the way in which they perform drama, there's a good history of stand up comedy, not all of it deliberate. Think that quirkiness is in some of the interests that the kids have too, from on their own leading a poetry group or setting up a lecture series on a topic that they're interested in. I think our job as teachers is to help them unlock their interests. It's bit like what I was saying earlier, a kid wants to come to me and set up a society to look at Lego, let's do it, let's have a Lego society, it's one of the most popular. [00:24:23] S0: Is it? [00:24:23] S1: That's why that 150 different clubs and societies has emerged, because of the interests of the pupils. Maybe that's not quirkiness but there's a charm to it. [00:24:38] S0: How [00:24:43] S1: do
00:24:43 · Scott Crawford, Ruth Benny
[00:24:43] S1: do [00:24:43] S0: you differentiate? You've got Brighton College up the road and in that part of the world there's a lot of competition, the market has changed. If I'm talking about Lancing to a family, how do I differentiate Lancing from whether it's Brighton or AN, other boarding school? A lot of these conversations say it's hard, I haven't been to the school and I must make that right. But what's the differentiator?
00:25:13 · Scott Crawford
[00:25:13] S1: I describe Lancing as a scholarly school rather than academic skill. By that I mean of course the children need to do well on their exams, but by golly we're not obsessed by the exams. In our lessons you won't see our pupils working through question after question after question to prepare them to get them to answer exams well. What we focus in on is the subject and trying to ignite a passion for biology and history and everything else that we do. And that's central. And from that exam results follow. And so that scholarly approach to asking questions and being curious learners and teachers feeling free that they can go off topic and leave the syllabus behind for a lesson and just follow a line of inquiry is part of our experience. My heart was singing recently when we had a Cambridge professor come and give a talk, a fantastic lecture at the interface between genetics and computer science and history, it was a really interesting presentation. And at the end our students, all different year groups, clustered around this poor man and asked them question after question for about an hour because they were hungry for ideas and in that group we had some of our top scholars and we had some students who are on that of C grade to B grade to A grade transition, but they're all united by a love for learning and it's what I bang on about in chapel and in assembly all the time and it's central and core to what we do. There's that, that's the curriculum, that's academics and then there is the identity of the College. We have our chapel which you may know is the largest school chapel in the world. We're very proud of our Christian identity, we gather in that place three times a week and regardless of the faith of the individual pupil, that experience of being together in one of the most extraordinary buildings...
00:27:29 · Ruth Benny, Scott Crawford
[00:27:29] S0: We can fit all the students together in the one chapel. Yes, [00:27:32] S1: and it's cathedral proportions, is huge. But it has a wonderful capacity to bring people together and when I meet alumni who haven't been at the College for decades, they always go back to those memories of being together with other students in that place and that sense of community being really strong and that's quite unique to us I think. [00:27:59] S0: What's the size of the College? [00:28:01] S1: So we're 600. [00:28:02] S0: Right, so what's mid sized? [00:28:04] S1: Is that what we would say? Yeah, and it's big enough that there's a lot going on but not so big that you can get lost and it means that we can do a one to one tutoring so at Lancing every student has a tutor assigned to them that they meet for thirty minutes one on one every week, which gives a lot of pastoral support obviously but help that's targeted to that individual with their timetable and planning and all those kind of things and again that's quite specific to us and our size. [00:28:34] S0: I look forward to coming, that chapel sounds amazing. And do do your assemblies in chapel as well? [00:28:40] S1: Yes, get together three times a week. On Tuesday morning we have congregational singing, so we are singing together. [00:28:45] S0: What style of singing are
00:28:45 · Ruth Benny, Scott Crawford
[00:28:45] S0: What style of singing are [00:28:46] S1: So we're hymn singing on a Tuesday morning and it's competitive so the houses are competing against each other. It's a big bag of Haribo for the winning house. On Wednesday we have a service led by our chaplain and then on a Friday morning I do a whole school assembly and that's rewarding achievements and notices, sports reports, some sort of moral message. But one of the things I have changed since I've arrived is to get more pupils to be speaking in that assembly slot because I think it's good practice for them. [00:29:16] S0: Do you wear your robes? [00:29:17] S1: I do wear my gown. We don't have a lot of fussy traditions at Lancing but we do like to dress up. [00:29:22] S0: I was going to ask you earlier when you said, do you have your own lexicon, your own vocabulary of the school? [00:29:30] S1: Yes, there's not a huge glossary to learn when new students arrive, but we have some specific words. So students, their study areas and their houses, they're called pits. So you'll hear students going back to their pit, which is much better than it sounds. [00:29:47] S0: Where does it come from? [00:29:48] S1: I don't know actually, I should really find out. It's probably one of those things where it doesn't really have an origin, Okay. Just sort of