3 minute read
JEAN ROSS RETIRES
from ONA 105
BY DR SIMON BARKER HEAD OF ENGLISH
Jean Ross retired after 14 years as an RGS English Teacher, the last seven also as the Head of Year 11, in 2008. It was a highly imaginative move to offer her a new role in retirement as Outreach Manager –someone to really make sure that our bursary scheme was working at its very best.
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The abolition of the Assisted Places
Scheme, which had facilitated something of the free grammar school principle on which the RGS was founded, was a genuine loss to the school. It had fostered a social mix and provided a quality of opportunity to students who would not otherwise have had that benefit. The bursary scheme that has replaced it seeks to recover those values. A moral integrity has been at the heart of Jean’s understanding of her role for the last ten years: we have ‘a duty to share our privilege’, as she puts it. A bursary is an enormous enrichment to its recipient; the recipient is an enormous enrichment to the school community, which is why it has to be a human process and not a spreadsheet exercise.
Fundamental to her philosophy is that we owe it to our generous donors to make sure that available bursaries are going to the students who will benefit the most, and need it the most. This has been her rigour and has been firmly cemented in her ten year role. She has interviewed all bursary applicants and their parents; in the Sixth Form, she has made a home visit to all applicants. Jean, alongside her colleagues in establishing what she and Tom Keenan (Head of Sixth Form) call ‘a scale of deserving’, made their core value the students who would benefit from the ‘most life-changing opportunity’. That’s a phrase to linger over at the heart of the bursary mission, which she has firmly grounded.
The best person to enact this role is someone who knows the RGS as a working, teaching institution; someone who has a knowledge of the social fabric of the school, and who knows where a student will find a niche; someone to meet the student and their family on their own ground. Of course, Jean has all of these human qualities in spades. She tells me, when I ask about her greatest disappointment in the role, that ‘it brings tears to your eyes and breaks your heart’ that we just don’t have enough money to go around. Richard Metcalfe, the Bursar who appointed her, expressed it with more humour: ‘The reports which followed each interview and visit were always succinct and highly informative. The fact that most ended with a summary to the effect that the child would almost certainly benefit from coming to the RGS had a mixed reception in school — joy from the Head of Year who had first spotted the applicant’s potential, but more apprehension from a Yorkshire Bursar who might have hoped that a Scot of all people would share his reluctance to commit quite so much of the limited support available’. When pressed, she concedes that she sought to bring a ‘comforting bridge’ to the role. That is clearly felt by a current bursary recipient, who writes: ‘a few minutes into the interview I was calmed down because of how warm Mrs Ross was: it made me feel like I was talking to someone I knew genuinely wanted to know more about me. During our conversation she was very empathetic and understanding. She came across as a very friendly and caring human being. I don’t remember thinking that way about someone ten minutes after I have met them! It really was a great exemplar of the tone of the RGS, which makes me excited to be there, but equally, sad that it is my last year’.
In her ten years as Outreach Manager, Jean has made sure we have got it right: right in making sure that the generous financial contributions are going to the most deserving of students; right as an advocate for students, whose parents might not have made an academic education a priority. In carving out this new role, she leaves the most wonderful paradigm for her successor.
