Tag Archives: Education

Bedales education

A positive approach to transforming lives – inspiration from Head of Gladesmore School

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By Rob Reynolds, Director of External Relations

Bedales was lucky enough to hear this week from Tony Hartney CBE, Headteacher of Gladesmore Community School, Tottenham, who gave a Civics talk in the Lupton Hall to students, staff, parents and local people.

Gladesmore serves a community with high levels of economic disadvantage. Families face numerous challenges in their daily lives and the children typically display low self-esteem and start school with reading levels well below their chronological age. The school is a ten-form entry, mixed secondary community school, with a rich diversity of cultures and languages.

Tony explained how his own up-bringing has shaped his career and educational approach. His mother died when he was 10 after he had been caring for her; because of this, he was denied the opportunity to apply for grammar school. Instead, he attended the secondary modern where he was frequently caned and denied any opportunities to better himself. This, he says, made him “cry inside, but I never showed it”.

Tony’s education proved to be a defining period for him, deciding that he wanted to offer disadvantaged children better experiences of education than his own. He not only wanted to teach, but he set out to be a headteacher where he thought he would be able to exert sufficient influence to change people’s lives.

He threw himself wholeheartedly at his chosen career, volunteering for everything and working his way up through the teaching ranks.

When Tony took over as Head of Gladesmore in 1999, the school struggled to keep staff, only 4% of students passed GCSE English and Maths, and in the first week his deputy was assaulted by students. Tony looked beyond this and the deprivation of the many sink estates to see wonderful people. He felt they just needed some hope and confidence to be successful. This attitude has informed his approach ever since – relentless positivity and striving to build a community spirit.
Fast forward 22 years and there has been a complete transformation in culture and much positive recognition: an outstanding school, a strong school community, many role models in the student and staff body, excellent relations with the Police, and strong external partnerships such as their selection as a football Premier League flagship school.

Tony talked of the benefit of offering his students opportunities to attend boarding schools for Sixth Form. He now places around 20 students per year in a range of independent schools, including Bedales. He is a strong advocate of this approach which he sees as successfully instilling confidence and belief in young people. He described Bedales as “a total life-changing opportunity.”

Having now established the scheme, Tony invites students back – a virtuous circle of role models, inspiring younger students to believe they can also be part of such a scheme.

Hearing about the challenges facing Gladesmore students, and the transformational impact provided by boarding school bursaries, has given us at Bedales additional impetus to expand Bedales’ provision. The John Badley Foundation (JBF) was established by the school 10 years ago to be more ambitious with bursaries, and provide life-enhancing opportunities for young people who would not be able to consider such an education without full support. To date it has funded 20 pupils who have joined Dunhurst or Bedales. With the support of members of the school community, the JBF has ambitions to grow to help more students, so that by 2024 there will be two fully funded pupils in every year group from Block 1 upwards.

We are very grateful to Tony for visiting Bedales and talking so passionately about social mobility and his work to ease education inequality. We are looking forward to strengthening our relationship with Gladesmore so that we can continue to learn from each other as institutions, and assist Tony in his mission to provide life-changing opportunities for the young people of Tottenham. 

Questioning GCSE

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By Magnus Bashaarat, Head of Bedales

In a recent article by Haroon Siddique in The Guardian, Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner expressed concern that Tory education reforms are putting state school pupils at a disadvantage compared to those educated in independent schools. More specifically, the Labour party is demanding an inquiry on the basis that state school pupils are obliged to sit GCSEs whilst many independent schools favour IGCSEs. The former are harder, claims Labour, with MP Lucy Powell arguing that independent schools are gaming the system by offering their students easy options, and insulating them against the effects of reforms whilst they are bedding in.

Labour is quite right to want an inquiry, but not on this premise which is shaky to say the least and misses the mark by some distance. One key question concerns the relevance of GCSE level qualifications in an age when education to age 18 is compulsory. Another is about assessment orthodoxies and, in turn, the relationship between these and issues of wellbeing amongst young people that have caused such concern in recent times.

In 2016 former Education Secretary, Lord Baker decried the squeezing out of creative and technical subjects in our schools. I share Lord Baker’s views on the inadequacy of the GCSE curriculum in preparing young people for the 21st century labour market, and indeed would not be unhappy to see them go. If we must have them, however, an inquiry should then ask what the curriculum and assessment should look like. I would argue, and many in education and industry would agree, that GCSEs are narrow and dull, and do little to prepare students for what awaits them at A level, higher education and in the workplace.

When Education Secretary, Michael Gove introduced the ‘new’ GCSEs, he lit the fuse, then withdrew a safe distance, and ultimately reappeared at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. His ‘new’ GCSEs were all about ‘rigour’, which essentially meant doing away with coursework, and placing all the assessment in a terminal exam at the end of Year 11, with little or no scope for ‘re-takes’. But the acquisition of knowledge replaced the learning and application of skills, and inconsistent, unaccountable and sloppy marking remained the norm.

This is why so many schools, including Bedales, favour IGCSE as the richer option, whilst at Bedales we went one step further in also creating Bedales Assessed Courses (BAC) for 13 non-core subjects including Classical Music, Design, History, Philosophy, Religion & Ethics and Outdoor Work. In the summer of 2018 our first cohort completed the new BAC in Global Awareness, which requires students to conduct their own research on a global issue – eg. food poverty, housing, public health – and, through collaboration, to apply what they have learned to the problem in a local context, and then present it. We are immensely proud of what we consider to be a pioneering, demanding and highly relevant educational programme. Our reward for this? For BACs to be ignored in education league tables, a fate shared increasingly with the unduly maligned IGCSEs.

There is a long tradition of radical liberal thought informing the design and content of mainstream education in this country; rather than looking to score easy political points by bashing independent schools. Labour would do young people and schools alike a much greater service by working with us in finding alternatives to a curriculum and assessment regime that is dull, out of touch and frankly oppressive. With former Cabinet Secretary Lord O’Donnell warning that an addiction to exams for young people ramps up the risk of a mental health epidemic, the reformed GCSE system – built around a conviction that only end of course exams can truly assess learning – seems a dangerous horse to back.