Destination Education
00:02:13 · Ruth Benny, Scott Crawford
[00:02:13] S0: Must have Scottish. And I presume, and I know that it's still the case, that most of the students in Scotland will stay in Scotland for university. Did you get a scholarship? [00:02:22] S1: No I didn't, but I remember at the time there was certainly a sense in school that you would go to Edinburgh or Dundee or St Andrews and I fought against that a little I think I had watched Brideshead Revisited or something on television and so Oxford is an attractive place to go. So I applied and got an interview [00:02:46] S0: and I ended up [00:02:49] S1: was the first kid in forty years to go from my school to Oxford, but not because I was particularly clever, it's because I just really wanted to do it and didn't want to take that tried and tested path to the very good universities that are in Scotland. But I went down south and stayed. [00:03:04] S0: And then how did you go from biology degree, was it biology degree? [00:03:10] S1: Yes, I did biological sciences at Oxford, was a three year degree and towards the end I didn't know quite what to do. All my chums were going off into the city, they were corporate lawyers, going off to some investment banking and I thought that wasn't quite right for me. But I really enjoyed the biology so I was lucky enough to get a funded PhD scholarship to study genetics. But that meant moving from Oxford to York, so I went up to York University and spent four happy years there researching an aspect of plant developmental genetics. Again, I enjoyed, but quickly I realised that I was better at teaching than doing experiments.
00:03:10 · Scott Crawford, Ruth Benny
[00:03:10] S1: Yes, I did biological sciences at Oxford, was a three year degree and towards the end I didn't know quite what to do. All my chums were going off into the city, they were corporate lawyers, going off to some investment banking and I thought that wasn't quite right for me. But I really enjoyed the biology so I was lucky enough to get a funded PhD scholarship to study genetics. But that meant moving from Oxford to York, so I went up to York University and spent four happy years there researching an aspect of plant developmental genetics. Again, I enjoyed, but quickly I realised that I was better at teaching than doing experiments. [00:03:54] S0: Because as part of your PhD you have to do some teaching? [00:03:57] S1: That's right, I did some undergraduate teaching and discovered that I was better at that than being in the lab. So at the end of it I thought gosh, maybe I should become a teacher. So I saw an advert for a biology teacher job at a school in London and again applied, got an interview and became a biology teacher. [00:04:19] S0: So you started as a biology teacher, was that at Highgate? [00:04:21] S1: That was at Highgate, yes. [00:04:22] S0: That's a good school to start off with.
00:04:22 · Ruth Benny, Scott Crawford
[00:04:22] S0: That's a good school to start off with. [00:04:24] S1: It was a great school, I had a whale of a time, so I spent nearly a decade there and had fantastic mentors and at that point at Highgate I was able to try lots of different things within schools. Obviously I taught for a few years, became a qualified teacher and then I was a housemaster for a couple of years, I had a pastoral role. Then I moved into academic management, so I took over running the biology department and then towards the end I was the head of science. So there was a lot of opportunity at Highgate at that time to get those positions of responsibility and move forward. I worked with great people and the kids were fantastic and I loved living in London, it was a great time. [00:05:04] S0: It was a nice part of London. And then you went back to Oxford for a little bit and then you've come to Lancing, but I want to ask you, so all of your teaching career up until last year had been in day schools. There must be a huge difference between heading up a day school and a boarding school. What's the key difference that you found?
00:05:04 · Ruth Benny, Scott Crawford
[00:05:04] S0: It was a nice part of London. And then you went back to Oxford for a little bit and then you've come to Lancing, but I want to ask you, so all of your teaching career up until last year had been in day schools. There must be a huge difference between heading up a day school and a boarding school. What's the key difference that you found? [00:05:26] S1: I think it's a combination of that sense of living alongside people day by day and the depth of relationships that form I think is a result of that. I worked in very successful day skills, there were very busy high octane places, the days were relatively short compared to a boarding school day, which meant that everything was very intense and there was a great energy to the school and I think that's fantastic and I really enjoyed that. But in boarding you get expansiveness, you get spaciousness, not just in terms of the acreage that we've got at Lancing but that time in the day to really develop those relationships and that's the single biggest difference that jumps out. I I was an interesting candidate for the Governors when they appointed me because I hadn't worked in a day school so it was a bit of a gamble I think that they took on. [00:06:26] S0: Has it paid off? [00:06:27] S1: I hope so, I'm still there and enjoying it. [00:06:30] S0: My son went to Undal who received your predecessor and I think he left. So he left at the same time. [00:06:39] S1: That's right, we passed over. Interesting, [00:06:43] S0: as you say it must have been a leap of faith for them or they must have seen something.
00:06:43 · Ruth Benny, Scott Crawford
[00:06:43] S0: as you say it must have been a leap of faith for them or they must have seen something. [00:06:48] S1: When I was a kid growing up in Scotland I was desperate to go to boarding school and I asked my parents every year to send me off and they never did. So I feel as though I'm catching up now. [00:06:59] S0: We did 13 schools in three weeks in June and quite a lot of time in Scotland and I didn't know that 25% of students in Scotland are privately educated, as opposed to the, well it's always a 6% isn't it, in the rest of the country. It's amazing, do you know why that is? [00:07:18] S1: No, don't really. I mean there are some fantastic skills, building skills in Scotland and independent skills and there's a real cluster in Glasgow and Edinburgh. But no, it wasn't for me so I'm making up for lost time working in one. [00:07:35] S0: So it's been a full year and we're just a few weeks into your second year. What are some of the changes that maybe you were cautious not to make in the first year that you will be making going forward?
00:07:48 · Scott Crawford
[00:07:48] S1: Yes, think I did that classic thing that new heads do of taking time to take the temperature of the school and really learn to understand it. I had a huge run-in period, I had eighteen months before I actually started, which is a really long time between being appointed and actually getting there. Notwithstanding that I still needed the year really to understand how the school works. Boarding schools are hugely complex organisations and we have the College and three prep schools, so I was trying to get my head around not just the College but also the wider family That of Lancing skills and the takes a bit of time. But during that time I was testing some scientists talking, was testing the hypotheses of things that I might want to change and someone gave me the really good advice of if you're going to change something make sure it's important. Don't change something that's unimportant, which is sort of keeping your powder dry for those things that significant. And so as we got towards the end of the year, working with the exec team and the governors we have put together our plan now for where the school is going to go over the next three to five years. And we're working on a parent version of that, which will be going out soon. And there are some fairly obvious things in there that we should be doing as a school in 2026. We're looking at the curriculum with quite a focus on what we do in those middle years. My heart sinks when a skill gets defined by the exam syllabus and when we talk about the GCSE years. So we're looking at the courses, the subjects, what we're doing in year 10 and year 11 in a way which freezes up from the GCSE specifications. That doesn't mean that we're ditching GCSE's at all but we're trying to find some space to do other things.