Director

People ask me what makes a good school, expecting a list. I have come to think the honest answer is another question: what should a young person be able to do at seventeen that they could not do at seven? Not know — do. Hold a position and defend it. Sit with a problem that has no clean answer. Speak to an adult as an equal. Lose something that mattered and come back the next morning anyway.

Everything here is measured against that. It is why we choose teachers for how they think, not only for what they scored, and why we have worked hard to keep the ones who stay. A teacher who remains for years learns a family, and a family that is known behaves differently from one that is processed.

I am wary of schools that describe themselves entirely in results. Results matter, and ours are good — but a result is a photograph of one day in a child's life, and a school is answerable for all the other days. The syllabus finished properly, the paper marked honestly, the parent told the truth about their child: these are the floor, not the ceiling.

So we hold two things at once, and I will not let go of either. The examination will be taken seriously. And the child will also stand on a stage, play a match for a house, be given a responsibility and be trusted with it, and discover the particular thing they turn out to be good at — which is rarely the thing their parents expected.

Judge us by what our students are like at twenty-five. That is the only test I am willing to accept.