Around this time of year – partly, I confess, prompted by admissions season – I often find myself considering the benefits of Highgate being an all-through school: that is, one at which pupils can stay throughout their school career.
Should children, or perhaps more accurately their parents, choose, they can join Highgate in Reception. Many who do so will stay with us for 14 years, right up to the completion of A Levels. Others will join us at 7+, ultimately racking up eleven years. Still others join in Year 7 and 12, and occasionally in between.
Needless to say, you’ll have a great time at Highgate whenever you enrol. We have around 80 pupils join us in Year 7, and another 30 in Year 12, and we love how our new pupils integrate and very quickly feel part of the Highgate family. It’s something we’re often asked about, and we have a good story to tell: but that’s for another time, perhaps.
Over their time here, our earliest starters will transition from the Pre-Prep into the nearby Junior School, then (literally) up to the Senior School where they do most of their lessons at “Top Site”: that scary* place in Highgate Village, full of mythical domains like Mr Pettitt’s Office and The Dungeons**.
That journey is free from any further entrance tests. We do not ask Year 2s to prove their worth before entering the Junior School at Year 3, nor Year 6s to leap a hurdle into Year 7. We do have a GCSE threshold to secure entry into the Sixth Form, but for those of you pondering 4+ and 7+ entry that’s a comfortingly long way off.
In other words, once you’re in, you’re in, for quite some time at least. What a liberating joy that is. No need to do the rounds of 11+ open days, entrance tests and interviews; just concentrate on the job in hand – which is, living school life to the full.
This also frees our teachers to teach without worrying about how to ensure Year 6 make it into their preferred secondaries. Instead, they can focus on educating them in what we believe is really important, free from the terminal goal of Getting In Somewhere.
Be in no doubt, however, that our Year 6s will be academically ready for Year 7. Several years ago I overheard a pupil, new into Year 7, state that their entrance test was harder than that for the Pre-Prep which was “just putting blocks into holes.” The clear implication was that pupils joining us in Year 7 have somehow been held to higher standards than their ex-Junior School peers.
This is bunk. The lack of entrance exams for our Year 6s does not mean we take our foot off the academic accelerator. We keep the pace high, but don’t just speed into, say, Year 8 content – which is, after all, Year 8 content for a reason. Instead, we revel in the joys of age-appropriate rigour and depth. I challenge anyone to say that a Year 6 curriculum which covers, among many, many other things, creating algebraic formulae, using colons and semi-colons with purpose and value, Macbeth, global trends in migration and multi-step problems (involving percentages, naturally) is anything but mind-bendingly stretching.
Further, our Year 6s will be well schooled in oracy (you should hear the quality of their debate teams), group work, and inquiry. The “Talking History” competition, introduced last year, is just one way in which we develop and challenge intellectual arguments, as well as practise public speaking. Not satisfied with the fact that something happens, they will want to know why and how. This fits seamlessly with our Senior School approach to, for example, Maths in which understanding how you get to an answer – i.e. why is it 27, not just that it is 27 – is highly prized.
To that end, the “ignore the exam” approach is something else we take into the Senior School. Year 7 have end of year exams only in a handful of subjects, because we think we can assess them more effectively in other ways. Year 8 have only slightly more. We ban talking about “the GCSE years” and refuse to be bound by the confines of A Level exam specifications. Of course we’ll cover what’s needed – our public exam results are testament to that – but why restrict our pupils to the relatively meagre diet of exam board requirements?
We want our Year 6s to hit the Senior School with a deep-set, fully ingrained belief that education is fun: a thrilling ride on the intellectual high wire. A colleague recently told me that one of their Year 10 boys, a demographic not always known for its unbridled scholastic enthusiasm, had said he was “excited to learn about the Cold War.” That excitement is priceless: the idea, hard-wired into pupils by the age-appropriate, carefully calibrated content and teaching techniques in our Prep-Prep and Junior Schools, that learning about things is exciting – not diverting, or mildly interesting, but exciting – is exactly what we want.
We can do this because we share an approach across the three schools. This is not to say that we teach in exactly the same way: what’s good pedagogical practice in Year 2 won’t be right for Year 5, and what works for Year 8 may not in Year 12. But the underlying principles remain: how can we enthuse the pupils, make them feel the same love our teachers do for their subjects?
Further, we begin early in the fight against specialisation. We want our pupils to be hungry for more of everything. The English education system requires, eventually, deep focus on a narrow range. But lower down the school we work hard to keep all options open, encouraging a spirit of throwing yourself equally into everything.
I have been known, in assemblies, to use the analogy of a sweet shop: you might know you like jelly babies, but have you tried liquorice allsorts? They could be just the thing, a new and delicious taste sensation you never could have imagined.
This doesn’t apply only to academia, where you might find that you thought you knew what you enjoyed until you tried Greek in Year 9 or Philosophy in Year 12. It’s equally true of the co-curriculum. When our ex-Junior School pupils come to the Year 7 Societies Fair, eager to find out about all the weird and wonderful clubs on offer, they will be quite used to our expectation that to really make the most of Highgate, you have to really make the most of everything on offer, be that Beekeeping Club or Lower School Politics Society or Yoyo Society.
There are some practical advantages to being all-through, too. Our ex-Year 6s will know some of their Year 7 teachers. For example, the sports department teaches pupils in all years, and Senior School language and Maths teachers run classes in the Junior School. They will know the difference between the MSC and the Mills Centre, how to get lunch, and to wear trainers on the astropitch. Little things each, but together they make the transition to Senior School a whole lot easier.
Of course, all of this happens at other schools as well. It’s not rocket science (though our Physicists do cover that). Pupils joining us from other schools are in no way disadvantaged, and will soon sort the MSC from the Mills. But you don’t need entrance exams to provide impetus. You need willing pupils, skilled teachers, an ambitious curriculum and an understanding of how to help children love their learning. That’s Highgate, through and (all) through.
*Actually, not at all scary.
**A nickname for some very welcoming History classrooms. They are so called because they are underneath what’s now the Sir Martin Gilbert Library.
About the author Adam Pettitt, Head Adam has been Head of Highgate since 2006. He was previously Head of Modern Languages at Abingdon School and then Deputy Head at Norwich School. He read French and German at university and continues to teach both subjects to Y9 pupils at Highgate. Beyond work, Adam enjoys running marathons and is a recent convert to inter-railing.
