The Roundup - Edition 86

A message from 
Rich Jones, Head.

Happy New Year, and best wishes for 2026 to the wider St Chris community. I hope you have all had a restorative break with family and friends, and that the sharp shock of January and its temperature dip has been survivable.

For many of our older students, the return to school also marks the return of that ominous word: exams. Our V Group (Year 11) students sat their mocks before Christmas, and the Upper Sixth have come back straight into A Level mock examinations, trudging through frost and rain towards sports halls, exam desks and hard thinking.
It is tough. It matters. It still has value.

But as with so much in education and in the world beyond it, the context around examinations is shifting, and fast.
For my generation, and perhaps one or two before it, exams were the point. Results were the aim, the sorting mechanism and the ticket to opportunity. Secure the offer, earn the degree, enter the career lane, climb steadily, retire gently, preferably with a warm Horlicks at the end of it all. It was a brutally Darwinian system and, in truth, never particularly fair, but it was broadly understood.

That is no longer the case.

Examinations, degrees and universities remain important for the vast majority of young people. That has not disappeared. What has changed is the assumption that a degree alone guarantees progression, security, or social mobility.

Recently, the Vice-Chancellor of King’s College London described degrees not as passports, but as visas. A subtle but important shift. A visa gives you access. It does not guarantee where you will end up, how long you will stay, or what you will make of the opportunity. That, he argued, is now defined by what sits around the qualification rather than the qualification itself.

How young people communicate.
How they collaborate.
How they navigate complexity, uncertainty and people.
How broad their experiences are.
How curious they remain once the syllabus runs out.

The world still cares about what you know. Increasingly, it cares just as much about what you can do with it.
This does not make the process of revision, focus, discipline and exam pressure redundant. Sitting in a sports hall trying to recall formulas, dates, structures and definitions still reveals something important about resilience and commitment. But the question being asked by universities, employers and society is now wider. What surrounds that result? What else has shaped this young person?

Since its inception, St Chris has been clear that education is about the whole child. That is not a fashionable add-on; it is our foundation. And at moments like this, it feels quietly reassuring that what once looked progressive now looks simply realistic.

You can see it in the expansion of our Robotics programme and the extraordinary student leadership sustaining it (more on that in next week’s Roundup!). In those shortlisted for film festivals. In students volunteering in care homes, working with animals, representing their peers as Junior and Senior officials, or contemplating a month in Costa Rica to work in local communities next year via our co-curricular programme. You can see it in why we are running two Careers events this term, deliberately and unapologetically.

This is not accidental. It is cultural.

And it rests on something we have never pretended otherwise about. I do not believe that intelligence can be neatly captured by what a young person produces in a frenetic two-hour examination on a hot day in June. It never has been. Human understanding, creativity and problem-solving are far richer, messier and more interesting than that.
Victorian-era, time-bound examinations were designed for standardisation and sorting, not for recognising the full range of how people think, learn and contribute. They reward speed, recall and performance under pressure. Those things matter. But they are not the same as intelligence.

We know that young people make sense of the world in profoundly different ways. Some build. Some question. Some perform. Some design. Some lead quietly. Some think slowly and deeply. Some need time, context and purpose before they flourish. Education that ignores this does not create excellence. It narrows it.

So yes, degrees increasingly function as visas rather than passports. And yes, examinations still matter. But at St Chris we will continue to resist the lazy idea that a set of grades defines a person’s worth, potential or future.
What matters is who our young people are becoming alongside what they can demonstrate on paper. That has always been our position. It remains so.

If others are now arriving at the same conclusion, that is welcome.

We will keep going.