As I sat at last evening’s Duke of Edinburgh Awards Ceremony here at St Chris I reflected on a number of things. I thought about the value of Service to others; I thought about the value of taking risks; I thought about the value of physical activity and of developing new skills. What struck me very strongly this evening was how lucky we are to be able to be Truly independent.

Recently there’s been a great deal of talk of ‘Free Schools’ which simply cannot work without massive financial investment from the Government. You cannot have small classes, extended days, longer terms, well paid staff and great facilities with what the state currently allocates (otherwise they’d already have these things!) the funding will be covert; the Government cannot afford for their experiment to fail. It is, I feel a dishonest venture in all sorts of ways.

We’ve also had the Ebacc nonsense. The English Baccalaureate (EBacc) is a purely notional performance indicator; it is not a qualification, diploma or a certificate. It exists only in the realm of Government league tables. It’s called a baccalaureate but is nothing like the International Baccalaureate that enables breadth and depth of study as well as extended work and civic engagement. It stupefies children and assumes that ‘one size fits all’ – well it doesn’t. Children are all different (thank goodness).

Add to this reduced staffing, larger class sizes, University education that is too expensive for many to contemplate but with no real alternative and an ever increasing emphasis on just exam success and guess what – you end up with a system in turmoil. I don’t mind the system in turmoil as we are truly independent and can more or less do what we feel is right. What I do mind is the thousands of children for whom there is no alternative.

The Government needs to open its ears, eyes and most importantly its mind to alternative ways of doing things. Education must be about a relationship between teacher and taught. As George Arundale said in his lecture that inspired the founding of St Chris:

“The keynote to the whole subject is that the teacher’s job is not only to instil learning and knowledge into the pupil’s mind, but also to evolve his character and awaken his inner nature to a wider understanding of men and things - through bonds of mutual affection and Trust.”

And there can be no better demonstration of Arundale’s words in action than the Duke of Edinburgh’s excellent awards scheme here at St Chris.