Chapter 13: City of London Freemen’s School
RM: I appointed a development officer who started things going. She left back in November 2018 and I recruited a new person who has started very well. I also have a consultant whom I am using to steer us through at a higher level. In both my old school and Freemen’s, we didn’t have a database but now we have one and have cleaned it up; we held our first big ‘Forever Freemen’s’ function in the Guildhall last year. We’ve started to engage with parents and had a couple of good wins with them. One has generously agreed that they will fund a child in the school whilst their own child is going through, which is lovely. We are starting to have those conversations more widely before we go out to the alumni. JC: So what is the plan from here? RM: We’ve got to work hard on three fronts. We’ve got to keep on trying to raise money from current parents. We want to start engaging more with our alumni and that is why the relationship with them has to be handled carefully. The third aspect is to dramatically improve the facilities in the school, including extending boarding. We are a school of 910 with 60 boarders. We want to get to 100 boarders so that we would then also have a substantial basis of accommodation. We can use the asset during Easter and summer partly to support the family of schools but also to raise some money from overseas which we can plough back into bursaries and community and partnerships work. JC: Do your bursary students come at 11 or 16? RM: It’s a bit of both. We are trying to fund the expensive ones in the sixth form, so we have four Royal National Children’s SpringBoard Foundation places in the sixth form and we are taking another three next year; we have another SpringBoard pupil in Year 9. We work with partners we know well, for example Ray Lewis at Eastside Young Leaders’ Academy who now support girls as well as boys and Gladesmore School, which has extremely supportive staff and sends pupils who are hungry to take the opportunity. We have a community and partnerships officer, and she is helping us to identify the bursary candidates who could benefit most from the opportunity as well as doing important liaison work with state schools. We are fortunate in having a boarding element in the school because it is there that you can have a serious conversation about kids who need looking after. That is certainly what we did at Rendcomb and we had wonderful success stories. For example, a fostered girl from a previously very disadvantaged background who ended up playing lacrosse for the west of England. We have a target at Freemen’s: we want 5% of the children in the school to be on 80%plus bursaries by 2022 and that will cost just over £1m per year. I know this is modest by the ambitions of some schools but we have started from zero. We want the 5% to be 10% very quickly. We came up with the 5% figure in 2015 so that gave us seven years to get there. We are also trying to expand the school so that we have a little more financial flexibility. But obviously the political picture and pressures on independent schools is ever-changing.
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