The Roundup - Edition 44

A message from 
Rich Jones, Head.

In today’s Roundup I am sure it would seem peculiar not to address the letter that you received yesterday from the Chair of Governors and me. I can imagine that it was not received with bounds of joy and happiness but I hope that it conveyed the large amount of work, analysis and soul-searching that has pervaded our work for some time. It was over a year ago that the Labour party pledged its intention on VAT and since then there has been tireless and thoughtful work, all culminating into that five-page letter.

In its more simplistic terms, I could have simply written … 'this sucks'.

Before I became a teacher, I had a career in the film industry, principally as a film editor. Editing film is a fascinating job and some of those skills have become transferable, certainly at leadership level.

In essence, editing is about pace and timing. It is the rearranging of parts in order to make the smoothest and biggest impact and it is finding the rhythm and pace of a response or narrative. This means finding the right balance between different elements to keep the audience engaged and the client happy. Another key aspect of editing is collaboration. An editor must work closely with the director and other members of the production team to ensure that their vision is brought to life. While this does require good communication skills etc. fundamentally, it is about understanding the story that is being told.

As you can imagine, all the elements fundamental to the art of editing have supported our work in recent weeks.

The obligation to pay VAT placed on the independent sector and our parents has been tough to take and to resolve in my mind and certainly in the minds of many of my colleagues. Morally, I fervently believe that our school should be pulling its weight in supporting, as much as is possible, our community and those in our communities that need that support. The educational value we offer is felt much more widely than just within the parameters of our site in relation to the partnership work we are doing with local state primary schools, our work with local charities, and our wider engagement with groups abroad. That, alongside our long commitment to fund local bursary places is the beginnings of a much better model for how the sector can really support more broadly and with a much more reasoned, sensitive and objective manner.

Sadly, those arguments that were made to our local MPs and through our membership bodies have fallen on fallow ground.

However, it does not change our commitment and our dedication to excellence at St Chris. We will continue to drive towards innovation and new ideas; we will be looking at how best we can deliver personalised learning and pedagogy with invention, continue to develop plans and processes to ensure wellbeing and resilience in our students, unfurling exciting ways to expand their experiences, their contentment and their horizons. In addition, yes, I still want us to play our part in our communities – not only for altruistic purposes but also for the betterment of us all. However in truth it might be that we must now seek new ways to do this, look at how we deliver this in a more efficient way or just in a different way … maybe.

We are a school that sits proudly with our ethos and values-based approach. There have been changes and bumps in the road before but we are resolute in our determination to balance the complexities we face and even more so in providing something that is not to be found elsewhere. An organisation with a genuinely child-centred approach where contentment, wellness and ambition are not to be separated.

One of the reasons I became an editor (and took up smoking as a 15-year-old) was because of the film Apocalypse Now (I figured I’d look like Martin Sheen if I smoked and was sweaty … sadly not). The director Francis Ford Coppola famously battled and battled to see his vision on screen and ended up editing huge sections himself. He once said “Compromise breeds creativity and excellence, always has”.

That quote was stuck to my editing suite wall and it seems just as relevant now…