VIEW FROM THE CLASSROOM
Nurturing cultural education through cross-school partnerships
options for both UK and international pupils from the age of 11 years, the school is set over 60 acres of beautiful grounds and places its renowned pastoral care and proven track record of academic success at the heart of its culture and ethos. There are currently 750 pupils on roll, and 83 teaching staff.
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n our ever-popular View from the classroom feature this month we are delighted to hear from Kelly Messik, Assistant Headteacher at St Margaret’s School in Herts, who discusses the benefits of cross-school partnerships and offers advice on setting these up in practice.
Tell us about your school
St Margaret’s School is an independent day and boarding school for pupils aged 2 to 18 years. Based in Bushey, Hertfordshire, the school is steeped in history and dates back to 1749. Offering a range of flexible boarding
How can you ensure that mutual benefits are clear?
Talking vaguely about cultural capital on a school website will not satisfy consumer appetite. Independent schools must make
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www.education-today.co.uk February 2024
Why are cross-school partnerships so important for cultural education? Having recently moved from teaching in a state school where I oversaw key stage 4 and enrichment activities, to overseeing enrichment and co-curricular education at an independent school, it is easy to recognise the tangible benefits of cross school partnerships, especially in relation to co-curricular activities and cultural education. Both of these can suffer from being an uncomfortable ‘add on’ to what schools are traditionally meant to do. Often these are delivered via contrived vague subjects such as ‘citizenship’ - like serving a glass of tepid water alongside a large bowl of soup. This approach adds very little substance or nutritional value to the serving for pupils. It is also frankly, not good enough in the private sector.
real efforts here to show quantifiably what they are offering, and how it creates impact on a forensic level. The state sector needs this too. They do not have the same pressures from a competitive market, naturally, but in her 2019 speech, Ofsted Chief Inspector Amanda Spielman explained that cultural capital in schools means that they should have “The essential knowledge, those standard reference points, that we want all children to have. So, for example, it’s about being able to learn about and name things that are, for many, outside of their daily experience.” All while meeting the demands of an increasingly academised national curriculum; one in which
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