Inclusion and Character

A Conversation for all

Paulines in Conversation with Dr Malcolm Cocks, Head of Inclusion and Dr Phil Gaydon, Head of Character Education.

N B-C: Can you tell us about your roles: what does it mean to be a Head of Inclusion and Head of Character Education?

Dr Gaydon: My role is to ensure that the school is providing enough high-quality opportunities for pupils to actively and thoughtfully develop their character across our academic and co-curricular programmes. What those opportunities should look like though is shaped by answers to other questions such as “What values do we think we should promote?” So, a big part of my work this year is consulting across the Pauline community and reviewing our current core values of Faith, Scholarship, Humility, Charity and Character.

Dr Cocks: I want to help foster a culture in the school where diversity is valued and where every member of the community finds belonging on equal terms. I work to ensure we all have equal stakes in the community and enjoy equal access to the school’s resources, that every pupil sees themselves reflected in our policies and protocols, as well as what and how we teach in the classroom. I try to facilitate conversation in the school and perhaps disrupt normative ways of thinking so we arrive at a culture that is restless where we are constantly refining and testing our ideals and values.

N B-C: Dr Cocks, inclusion is often mentioned in the same breath as diversity – are they the same thing? What’s the difference?

Dr Cocks: Diversity is a descriptor and a value that we aspire to whereas inclusion is the collective work we need to undertake to ensure that the benefits of diversity are leveraged for the whole Pauline community. Diversity isn’t always a guarantee that we find belonging or feel included – but it’s the starting point.

N B-C: Dr Gaydon, what are the priorities that lie ahead for us as a school in terms of values and character education?

Dr Gaydon: In the short-term, I think that we need to get a clear understanding of why the school has the core values it does in order to make sure that the foundation we’re building our character education programme on is as solid as it can be. From there, it is about asking what these values look like in each aspect of school life and systematically targeting the best places for long-lasting impact. For example, the expanded PSHE (Personal, Social, Health and Economic) curriculum will be the perfect place for embedding a lot of active reflection and values-based teaching and learning. Another key target will be the continued support of the new student-led Values Committee and providing it with more opportunities to run school-wide initiatives, be part of discussions with pupils from outside St Paul’s, and head-up inter-year peer-to-peer learning.

But as current members of the Values Committee and as people who have taken an active role in a variety of school groups, what do you think are the most urgent priorities?

F O’B: A key focus at St Paul’s should be the nurturing of a culture in which students feel safe challenging the potentially hurtful words and actions of others. I am determined that students should feel safe in the knowledge that –when engaging in those more difficult conversations – they have the backing of the wider school community. More engagement between older and younger pupils can potentially provide a strong means of cultivating a greater sense of community, solidarity, and allyship among students. Ideally, I would like students in the Fourth Form to feel just as safe in helping their friends find the right words with which to articulate themselves as students in the Upper Eighth do. N B-C: My education at St Paul’s has been extremely rewarding, but I do feel that at times its focus has been too narrow. Academic qualifications are undoubtedly important, but the school should also emphasise character. Service to a wider community, whether that be Barnes, London or the world, rather than a restrictive individualism, needs greater emphasis. Recalibrating the school’s priorities, with a more rounded approach, emphasising kindness, tolerance and an awareness of pupils’ position within a wider system, as well as of their privilege, would be very welcome.

N B-C: Dr Cocks, what do you think are some of the most urgent priorities for schools in terms of inclusion?

Dr Cocks: This is a hard question to answer because inclusion is tied up with well-being and safeguarding and ensuring that vulnerable groups feel safe is always a priority. It’s not possible to identify all our needs here without leaving people out and that’s against the spirit of inclusion!

But if I limit myself for the moment to three things: Inclusion and representation of Black students and staff is a priority. Sexism is a contested discourse and sometimes the debate can feel alarmingly polarised or alienating for many in our community. We have work to do also to secure better inclusion for gender nonconforming students and staff.

A challenge for us in all of these areas is how to have open and productive debate in a world where difference can often feel like conflict. We need to re-imagine the role of education in helping us to navigate an increasingly polarised media where we view, share, circulate, bear witness to, and sometimes just ignore a panoply of images and ideas that code sometimes troubling narratives in terms of sexism, or racism, or homophobia.

F O’B: Your point that we need to be able to recognise, resist, and call out these insidious cultures is really urgent. We all need to recognise our roles in shaping the kind of future we want for ourselves and each other and the work we need to do to ensure we are an open, diverse, inclusive community.

I think we also need to think about our community in a demographic sense: how do our recruitment and admissions processes support our aims? Can we say with integrity to future teachers and pupils who have been historically under-represented here that this is a place where they will find welcome and belonging. What do you think?

NL: We are already beginning to do a good job through the Equalities Societies that we have built up and combined in the most recent year. This creates a group of people who get together to talk about issues in the school community in a regular and comfortable situation. I think that the next step is to expand to the wider pupil body, such as with the recent Holocaust Remembrance presentation in Friday Tutors. Increasing opportunities like this normalises open discussion on these issues for the wider Pauline community.

N B-C: What difference has the establishment of the African and Caribbean Society (ACS) made to St Paul’s?

Dr Cocks: We recognise that Black students remain under-represented in the school. Isolation is one of the biggest challenges we face as a minoritized group. The ACS is great because it’s part of a wider network of ACS Societies at universities and increasingly in schools that gives small or isolated communities of Black students a collective visibility and a wider network of support. Schools in general can be really tough spaces to navigate for Black students because they remain largely white spaces: our histories but also pedagogies, our assumptions about the goals and even the methods of acquiring knowledge and its applications are steeped in a culture that has not been decolonised. So the ACS also allows us to explore and express aspects of our African & Caribbean identities and histories that are often suppressed in schools and crucially to share them with the wider community and to say, this also has value, this is also our collective culture: let’s learn to value it.

NL: Making people think about their actions can have a great effect as most of the sexist attitudes that people have are unconscious and when you challenge someone they will often realise they have caused harm. This should not be done in an aggressive way as this leads most people to end up in a defensive state where they are not open to learning. Constructively informing someone on the negative results of their actions is the best way to respond to sexist attitudes.

F O’B: All sexist remarks should be responded to in some way – awkward silence is the least desirable response, as the offending sexist attitudes remain unchecked or reinforced. I think that inadvertently sexist attitudes and remarks, within the context of a school, should be approached firmly, but with constructive learning in mind. It must, however, always be made clear that making harmful sexist comments is fundamentally wrong.

Dr Cocks: NL and F O’B, I really agree that context is important here and that silence can never be an option. I also don’t think a kind of universal humanism that says let’s all just be nice people is not always helpful right now, even if it’s well-intentioned. Nor is a kind of hazy laissez-fairism the right approach. Yes, it would be lovely if we could all just be good human beings and never mention masculinity again. But not talking about or not addressing the issue would be irresponsible. Understanding the cultures that have enabled genderbased violence and sexism is important so we can disrupt them because they undermine us all.

N B-C: Given the greater visibility of gender nonconforming people, is the concept of a single sex school now a contradiction in terms?

N B-C is Chair of the Values Committee, a Committee Member of FemSoc and a Member of the Inclusion Alliance.

NL is Co-chair of FemSoc, a Committee Member of Pride Soc and on the Values Committee.

F O’B is Head of PrideSoc, on the Values Committee and a Member of the Inclusion Alliance. ❚