Stephen Ward

Following all the work put into university applications last term, this is the time of year when our Year 13 students start to hear back from the universities they have applied to.

As usual, the Oxford and Cambridge offers came out in January, and it was particularly pleasing to see an increase on recent years in the number of offers received, with successes in a range of subject areas including Law, Human Sciences, Classics, French and English, Psychology, Philosophy and Linguistics, and Classical Archaeology and Ancient History. These offers sit alongside a whole host of others our Year 13 students have already received from leading universities such as Imperial College, UCL, Warwick, Durham, St Andrew's and Edinburgh. This is testament first and foremost to the hard work and preparation put in by the students themselves, but also to the excellent support and advice offered by our university guidance team led by Dr Curry and Mr Rudd for Oxbridge applications, as well as subject-specific support provided by academic departments. Our newly enhanced programme of university preparation sessions across all departments is now firmly established, and will be further enhanced next year to fully support all those looking to apply to university courses in a given subject area.

Of course receiving university offers is only part of the process; there is still the hard work of gaining the grades to meet those offers, and our Year 13 students are now in the final stages of completing syllabus content and moving onto revision ahead of the summer exams. The situation is similar for our Year 11 students as they move towards the culmination of their GCSE courses, and both they, and other Senior School students from all year groups, have been taking advantage this term of the newly renovated study room and reference library for private study and independent work. The room is available to all students throughout the school day, across breaks and lunchtime and after school until 5:30pm as a quiet space to work with access to a growing range of reference books and departmental textbooks.

The next phase of the development of our study facilities on the Senior School site will see the library renovated in similar fashion over the summer break, while work on expanding and cataloguing our fiction and non-fiction collections continues.

I hope all students, but especially our Year 11s and Year 13s, enjoy some much needed downtime over the half-term break.

Head of 11-18