Issue 7, June 2003 (Back to Contents)

Andrew Reekes, Director of Studies

Radleians helping out in Kerala, S.W. India (Click to enlarge)

Fifty years ago, Radley was rather an isolated Berkshire school, largely cut off from the world outside its estate. Strong links existed with the Radley College Mission at St. Peter's London Docks but there was little association with the local community. Although Radley remains a wholly boarding boys' school there has, since then, been a sea-change in the range of its contacts with others.

Radley, for example, is now an important training centre for teachers. Richard Morgan believed that prep schools, with few training opportunities in the early 1990s, would appreciate regular, stimulating and subject-specific training afternoons for their teachers; 12 years later, hundreds have passed through training afternoons designed to promote discussion about their subjects as well as the propagation of basic principles of literacy, numeracy and learning support teaching. We have gained much from this regular contact with prep schools. And because we have emphasised with our own Common Room the importance of high quality teaching, and ensured that young dons are trained for post-graduate teaching qualifications using our own staff as mentors, so we have established a reputation for professional development which has led to our becoming a Lead Training School for trainee teachers in southern independent schools with CfBT, the educational charity based in Reading.

We have developed links with schools in many other ways too. Back in 1997, we were one of the first independent schools to run a Literacy School for maintained school children - of Peers School, Blackbird Leys in Oxford. For a number of years, until the Oxfordshire LEA reorganisation, we had a partnership with St Augustine's Iffley, whose pupils attended our VI.2 lectures, and were given university advice and prepared for Oxbridge entry by heads of department at Radley. We are trying to extend this, endeavouring to be officially recognised, and recommended, by Oxford and Cambridge admissions dons as a centre for preparing maintained school children for Oxbridge entrance, in the belief that it is important to be willing to share an area of expertise with others. We had also planned a Summer School, in Classics, for gifted maintained school ten year olds in collaboration with the Children's University but have been thwarted by government funding constraints. Now we have plans to develop a Choristership scheme whereby local primary school children are trained to be trebles in the Chapel Choir. There are more details about this scheme in the article by the Precentor on page 5.

The Brownhills exchange with boys and girls from a West Midlands comprehensive school has been promoting mutual understanding for many years under Chris Butterworth's aegis and has been happy proof that not all such relationships need be characteristised by suspicion and resentment. Our links with maintained schools like Wheatley Park, with whom we debate, and those in Abingdon, with whom Shell boys discuss the merits of the Carnegie Medal childrens' book short-list, have been very successful, as has the Geography Department's long-standing association with schools here and all round the world with the Met-link weather project.

The wheels on the bus go round and round in Romania (Click to enlarge)

Quite as important in Radley's interface with the outside world has been Community Action, the vision for which was nobly philanthropic, that Radleians, so fortunate in what they had, should spend some of their Radley time working with and for others. This has refined itself into a post-GCSE period of work - in hospitals, old people's homes, schools and in worthwhile local projects. A more spectacular manifestation has been the highly successful Romanian expedition, as Radleians (and girls from St Helen's) spend 3 summer weeks teaching English in a Romanian school. Additionally, for the past 5 years, boys have gone out to Kerala, S.W. India, to help build village houses on what is now Radley Road, and the present Warden's enthusiasm has led to a new link with the Matthew Goniwe School in a township outside Capetown, some of whose children joined us at the end of the Lent Term.

Other ongoing community work has continued and developed over recent years: F Social's boys have adopted Radley Village primary school and help with reading, have fund raised £1000s, and have done important site-clearing work; and the visits to the elderly, well known to generations of Radleians through David Coulton's benign organisation of the social services option, still continue although a major review and reform of Wednesday afternoons will undoubtedly see this revivified and extended.

These philanthropic efforts merge with Radley's charitable projects and the last few years have seen a number of highly successful charitable campaigns. For example, the whole school walked for 'Hope and Homes for Children' in 2000 to the tune of £38,000; B Social raised substantial funds for Dialability and latterly the T-cell Lymphoma Fund in memory of Julian Starmer-Smith and G Social raised £1700 for Douglas House through a Jazz Evening last term which was devised and performed by the boys themselves. Each Sunday, Chapel collections go to a wide range of charities.

Radley's openness to the world outside is seen, physically, in the way the facilities are used by outside organisations. As I write, scores of young people from all round the globe who took part in the week-long United World Youth Council are leaving, passed on the drive by musicians from the National Youth Orchestra for whom Radley is now very much a holiday base. The Silk Hall is a magnet for orchestras - the East Sussex Youth Orchestra, the Oxford Schools Symphony Orchestra, the Thames Vale Youth Orchestra all come here, as do the Abingdon Solo Singers, Oxford Sinfonia and Abbey Brass. The sporting facilities are in constant demand when the boys are not using them; the astros by local football and hockey clubs, the swimming pool by the Abingdon Club, the Sports Hall by individuals in Radley Village and Abingdon, and the golf course by the 430 local members. The School has for long hosted the Vale Athletics, and the County Cross Country Championships, and the cricket pitches are used by Radley Village Cricket Club from June through to August.

All the foregoing is evidence of Radley's desire to establish links with the local, and the wider, communities. We have been motivated to do so by several impulses: it is good for the boys to give, to put something back, to broaden their horizons and to be made aware of their own good fortune, and it is important that Radley's quality - teaching and facilities - be shared with others to our mutual benefit. We monitor and coordinate all this through a committee chaired by a Council member, John Hedger. Ian Davenport, a senior Common Room member, has been appointed to initiate and to manage future links.