THE INTERVIEW
Professor Mark Bailey Journalist Mark Lobel (1992-97) talks to High Master Mark Bailey who returns to the University of East Anglia later this year.
W
e are sitting in an executive portacabin currently parked on the school’s tennis courts – in a makeshift room masquerading as his study – overlooking the river. It is the High Master’s last day holed up here before moving back into his newly renovated office. Bags full of waste – the fallout of any office move – surround us. I was keen to hear Mark’s views on Sally-Anne Huang, the next person to occupy his chair. She will be the School’s first-ever female High Master in its 510-year history when she steps down as Head of James Allen’s Girls’ School in Dulwich. I was originally meant to be interviewing her until she was hit by the flu. Atrium has been assured that Sally-Anne will speak to us when her feet are firmly under her new desk. The current High Master stepped up and quickly explained why her arrival is so keenly anticipated by the School.
“Staff and parents have said that the relative under-representation of senior female role models in the senior school is one area for improvement. Also, she has significant experience of a number of schools to draw upon.” Mark also thinks Sally-Anne’s media profile and upcoming role as Chair of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference will help put St Paul’s “back onto the national platform in educational debate” – a move he concedes is now “overdue”. He also expects her to focus on “academic provision” within the school, having spent less time on it himself than he would have wished to over the past nine years, alongside continuing the focus on “rebuilding, bursaries, safeguarding and pastoral welfare”. As we now know, it may only be three years until we see the first female students at St Paul’s too. Mark says it can not come too soon. But plans have yet to been signed off.
Some parents and boys remain concerned about the “cultural change” that it may bring. The entrance of girls is likely to be restricted to the 8th form but there is also a desire for a “critical mass so that girls make up to a third of the pupils in those years, so that they feel an integral part of the senior school and not just an afterthought”. But for many future parents of sons – or daughters – who are at the School, the biggest hurdle remains the cost of an education. In 2016, the High Master famously set alarm bells ringing by saying it had become “unaffordable”. What he actually said was the fees – which were over £22,000 then and for the Senior School are now over £25,000 a year – were “increasingly unaffordable” for middle-class parents. He says he would still describe current fees as “certainly unaffordable to certain groups of people” but is pleased that fees at St Paul’s have increased at a lower rate than the peer group London average over the past four years. But now he thinks that the School needs to “flatline” fees as much as possible over the next decade. “We’re going to have to promote commercial revenues to keep those fees flatlining and raise other money for bursaries and building projects.” As a bursary student himself, Mark Bailey could not be more in favour of expanding them at St Paul’s and is delighted to have seen more bursaries over the past few years, which includes children of parents with a joint income of £120,000.
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ATRIUM
SPRING / SUMMER 2020
