On 19 September, with much fanfare, the Secretary of State for Education announced GCSEs were to be scrapped and replaced with something more rigorous and something that would place the English education system amongst the best in the world. Curiously, at Haileybury we have a number of pupils who arrive from all over the world in the Sixth Form without any formal qualifications at 16 and yet they still go on to obtain 40+ points in the IB Diploma or multiple A* and A grades at A Level with little fuss. However, it would appear we are wedded to the idea of qualifications at 16. So, Michael Gove and David Laws continue, pupils will sit exams from just one chosen exam board with no potentially calamitous Controlled Assessment and all will be well. All well unless you are someone who teaches a creative subject or a pupil who would have enjoyed doing more than one of these. Mr Gove wants a return to more compulsory subjects. What is the future of creative and design subjects or languages, both Classical and Modern?

One doesn’t have to scratch too far beneath the surface to see that in actual fact this is no revolution. Only a handful of subjects will, apparently, be affected in 2017 with other subjects changing “later”. Other issues yet to be addressed include the future of IGCSEs, how the malaise in examining is to be dealt with, how exam boards will be selected and whether their cosy relationship with publishers is allowed to continue. The gravy train for publishers and examiners, highlighted in the national media, needs to be stopped, if only to prevent postings on exam board web forums from frustrated (but possibly quite lazy) teachers in Hertfordshire along the lines of ‘I taught my pupils everything in the exam board approved textbook and there was a question on material that wasn’t covered.’

Of greater importance, in my opinion, is solving the problems of AS and A2. We await another announcement on that this month. So, what studies will my son be starting in 2015, finishing in 2017 and moving on to for 2019? Will he leave school with ‘certificates’, a ‘Baccalaureate’, a ‘Diploma’ or all three? I and many of my colleagues would love to see changes. Mr Gove and Mr Laws have the opportunity to undertake a considered reflection (notably one of the IB attributes) of our education system rather than purely focussing on the end-of-course examinations. The piecemeal approach taken in tackling GCSEs and A Levels is in stark contrast to the clear continuum of learning from the Primary Years Programme (PYP) to Diploma Programme (DP) established by the International Baccalaureate.

There is not long until the next General Election and, although only some subjects will change, the principle concerns me. My memory of curriculum 2000 was an ill-considered and rushed set of syllabi which led to the modular chaos of the ‘noughties’. I fear similar chaos and am quietly pleased that I work in independent education.

For, as an independent school, we can be just that and therefore masters of our pupils’ destinies. There are far more options available to us than waiting for Mr Gove and Mr Laws to tell us what to do. The IB Middle Years Programme (MYP), for example, offers an attractive, holistic, stable, school-centric model of learning. Some schools are going a step further and introducing their own accredited qualifications. Currently, there are big holes in our educational examination provision.

At Haileybury we have launched two projects to try and fill the gap between the exam-driven system and the needs of the world beyond school: Haileybury Horizons and the Coghill programme (named after an Old Haileyburian and recipient of the first posthumous Victoria Cross). Haileybury Horizons is a carousel of cultural awareness, current affairs, philosophy of knowledge and experimental science. Unashamedly the latter two are versions of courses or projects in the IB Diploma. Should Current Affairs be more explicitly taught, particularly if schools are becoming the vehicle for social engineering as is essentially proposed by Frank Field? The Coghill Programme is focussed on leadership and teamwork skills but compulsory for all. Perhaps in 2017 my son’s cohort might receive the ‘Haileybury Certificate of Leadership’ or the ‘Haileybury Diploma in International Mindedness’. Paul Tough’s excellent new book How Children Succeed tells us they need “grit, curiosity and character”. Perhaps these should be the components of Mr Gove’s EBacc?

Of course, one option is that our pupils should do nothing at all. This year our IGCSE History results were outstanding. Who says 16 year olds can’t cope with a two-and-a-half hour exam without the coursework mark safety net? However, I am mindful that such grades were largely obtained through an intensive period of revision post-mocks from February to May. That is four months of study time – great if you want an A* in History, less so if you want to study an additional period or topic in those History lessons.  How much time is spent in schools revising, or even worse, re-learning/re-teaching the same material taught just 12 months earlier? Abandoning examinations at 16 would liberate schools to design their own curriculum.

Why don’t we do this? Why can’t we decide now, after a period of internal consultation, what our pupils will be studying in just over two years’ time? Two words: universities and parents. The two are inextricably linked. Understandably all our parents both current and prospective want their children to go to one of the very top universities and we want to support them in that ambition. Therefore any initiative, any great leap in a Haileybury curriculum would need the blessing, or least recognition, of a university admission tutor. As long as we retain our pre-results UCAS application process then pre-18 examination performance matters. A post-results application process would allow schools to teach with much greater freedom, safe in the knowledge that what would really matter was their qualifications at 18 rather than what came before. Sadly, the UCAS applications process also faces an uncertain future.

So, what will my son and thousands like him be studying for in 2017? I haven’t a clue and fortunately he’s not too fussed at present – he’s too busy trying to get into football or hockey teams or debating in the MUN.

Astana was recently the host to the regional round of the Davis Cup, and saw play between the home team against Uzbekistan. Members of Years Six and Seven were pleased to attend, and saw Kazakhstan see off the competition with some style. Tennis in Kazakhstan is a rapidly growing sport, attracting more interest every day.  Martina Hingis was in the Capital to meet with members of the National Tennis Federation and the Government of Kazakhstan to discuss new directions of coaching the already successful Kazakh team to further success. She was hugely positive about the school, and promised to come back and play with some of the staff and children, to everyone’s delight.

Located as we are in an arm of the River Ishim and surrounded by the latest Presidential Park in Astana, the School enjoys a superb location with plenty of green space around us. This has led us to consider our role in the growth of this sport. Supported by Yulia Pleshivtseva, Head of PE at Haileybury Astana and herself a previous national-level tennis player, the school hopes to develop a new state of the art tennis facility which would enable our own children to learn to complete at the highest level, and also be of benefit to our own pupils and the wider community of the city in which we live. In this way, we can achieve Martina’s hope that within our walls lie the elite of the future, able to take their place amongst the best the world has to offer.

In Kazakhstan, all schools start on 1 September with the traditional ‘Day of Knowledge’ celebration. Rather than the drear trudge into familiar routines, pupils flock to school with their families, laden with flowers and gifts for their teachers. The opening ceremony for Haileybury Astana’s second year saw the main hall packed to the balcony with parents, pupils and colleagues, familiar faces and new arrivals. We enjoyed a series of films made by staff over the previous year, reflecting our past activities, experiences and triumphs. The British Ambassador to Kazakhstan, David Moran, spoke to all assembled about the unprecedented impact of Haileybury Astana in just one year, and with close to three times as many pupils now than we started with at foundation, what more would be accomplished, particularly with our first senior classes coming into operation. The cloud of magenta balloons which swept over the steppe from the mass release in the quad was a pleasure to behold. We stand proud of our considerable impact on the face of education in Astana in such a short time, and we aim to do the same across the country, and in time, central Asia as a whole.

Kazakhstan is a place where it feels as if the future is taking shape around you, as this resource-rich country plays an increasingly important role in this pivotal region, sandwiched as it is between three of the world’s largest and most important economies. Our pupils will undoubtedly play a key role in the future development of the nation. The possibilities and adventures yet to come for both this country and the School are countless. Looking around the hall on the Day of Knowledge and in the corridors and classrooms in the days that followed, I have been struck repeatedly by the genuine joy on the faces of the throng, exploring the possibilities felt by all, the magic just waiting behind the morning.

On Saturday 17^th of March, the Removes set out for the Battlefields of Belgium and Northern France. We drove to the shuttle, crossed the borders and eventually arrived at the Youth Hostel relatively late. The next day we first travelled to Vimy Ridge. The site really helped to bring home the bravery of the men who died. It showed us how close the trenches of the enemies and the allies were together – around 25 metres at their closest – and also it gave us a vision of No Man’s Land. We also went to the Vimy memorial, which commemorates many of the Canadians who died in the war It was a very impressive memorial, especially with its size and stature.

However, the place that amazed me the most on the first day was definitely the Thiepval Memorial. This is a huge memorial monument, containing the names of 72,000 soldiers who died on The Somme and whose bodies were never found. It was truly a remarkable place, with so many names – including 37 Old Haileyburians. Here we left a wreath of poppies and held a one minute’s silence to remember the sacrifice of those recorded there. We also left a booklet containing information on the Haileybury Old Boys whose names were up there, which had been created by the pupils to help visitors to the memorial learn more about the former pupils who went out to France and never came home.

Our last trip of the day was to the Fricourt German cemetery, which included a big mass grave with over 12,000 bodies in. It was interesting to see the dark black crosses and to contrast them with the brilliant white at Thiepval and Vimy. After a well-earned rest, we began our final day in Belgium. We first visited the Langemark (German) and Tyne Cot (Allied) cemeteries, which were again very different from each other. After that we went to Essex farm, which is where John McCrae wrote his famous ‘In Flanders Fields’ poem, which is the reason we wear poppies on Remembrance Day. Essex Farm also includes a cemetery which is the location of the youngest soldier killed during the war; Valentine Strudwick. He was 15 years old.

Finally, we went into the main town of Ypres; scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the entire war. Here we visited the Menin Gate, another memorial to the British Commonwealth soldiers who were missing, and which includes the names of 40 Old Haileyburians. Here we laid a wreath and a memorial card in memory of Walter Lyon who was an Old Boy of the school and who was killed on the Western Front. I really appreciated the opportunity to visit a very interesting place like that and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute.

It was a pleasure to watch as these gentlemen discussed their experiences with members of Year Six, with gentleness and humour together with real emotion and honesty.  Later, staff and pupils, together with our guests, laid flowers at the Astana War Memorial, and were all honoured by a traditional Kazakh blessing which members of the crowd joined us in.

Nationalities, cultures and traditions blurred together in the midst of the memory of events which both shaped and changed the world; the inspiration, courage and humility shown by our visitors is an example to us all, wherever we come from.

I enjoyed the trip enormously, and I am sure that the pupils did too. However, having had a week or so to reflect, I have come to realise that ‘the South’ is in many ways a land of intriguing contrasts. For instance, it is immediately clear that a huge proportion of the population of the South are enormously proud of the role that their region, their relatives and, in some cases, they themselves played in the fight for Civil Rights. Many see it as their mission to educate the new generation – of Americans and beyond – and make sure that no one forgets just what people had to go through to achieve equality. “Without knowing where we have come from, we can never be sure where we are going” said one poster in Birmingham, Alabama, and this seems to encapsulate the attitude of many. Some of the guides we met bordered on evangelical, and were incredibly engaging as a result. However, despite this it was also possible at times to detect a sense that not everyone shared this view. Barack Obama is still seen as an ‘outsider’ by many in the South, and our coach driver – who himself experienced segregation growing up as a black youth in the late 1950s/early 1960s – was very clear that there were still those for whom the move towards equality was not necessarily a positive development. This is not to suggest for one second that any of this was explicit, or indeed open. But if you looked closely enough, you could perhaps sense that not all was as it first appeared.

Another contrast that the Deep South offers is based upon its perception. The Southern States are often viewed in a condescending manner by their Northern neighbours; think of the Duelling Banjos scene in the film ‘Deliverance’ and you will get the idea. Certainly there are many differences between Alabama and, say, New York or Los Angeles. I didn’t see one Starbucks in Alabama, for instance! In addition, the state was overwhelmingly rural, and the overall pace of life just seemed a little slower and more relaxed. However, in many other respects, Alabama could have been anywhere in America. Birmingham, the largest city, is a sprawling metropolis of over 1 million people, and large interstate motorways cut across the state as they do everywhere else in the country, with their ubiquitous and instantly recognisable green signs.  Also, for a supposedly ‘backward’ region, the museums and exhibitions were among the best I have been to anywhere in the world. Informative, well-planned, and seamlessly mixing new technology with History, they were educational, interesting and, at times, incredibly moving. One of the highlights of the trip for me was watching a group of around 15 pupils watching in complete silence for over 10 minutes as one museum screen played footage of Martin Luther King’s funeral. It was beautiful in its simplicity, and so much more powerful for that fact.

The welcome we received was incredibly warm. Almost everywhere we went locals would ask where we had come from and (perhaps after marvelling at our accents) would swell with pride when we told them we had come to study their State’s history. I will certainly be looking to organise the trip again next year, and will look forward to seeing if my judgements were sound. I would love to hear from you if you have any experience of this part of the USA, or indeed if you would simply like to find out more about the trip.

In short, modern psychology is the study of human behaviour and how the mind works, and it believes that this must be examined using the same hypothesis testing techniques as any other major science.

In practice this means that you will find psychologists all over the world studying pretty much every aspect of human life and behaviour. From the crowd dynamics of riots (click here for an article that appeared in The Guardian) to the age old argument about whether women really are better at multi-tasking than men,  there’s pretty much nothing that psychologists can’t find a reason to study!

Studying psychology in the Sixth Form at Haileybury means you will engage with some of the breadth of this interest through A Level study or the IB. Both look at the way that various schools of psychological thought have tried to explain human behaviour and analyse the differences between them.

We examine key (and often ethically questionable!) studies in social psychology, including the electrifying conformity studies done to find an explanation for the holocaust.

There’s also a focus on the explanations psychologists give for common human problems like depression and schizophrenia, and all this runs alongside research method modules in which we learn how to conduct psychological studies and recognise ‘bad’ science.

As a qualification, the study of psychology at A Level is supported by the leading universities and, when at university, it can be studied as a discipline on its own or in conjunction with lots of other subjects. Some of these include philosophy, politics, economics, history, natural sciences - the list goes on!

If you’re keen to find out what’s happening in the world of psychology or want a bit more information about what we do, then have a look at the departmental blog  and feel free to post a comment or respond to one of the posts we put up.

 Our job was to propose the nature of History (a tough task given the diversity of philosophical views in the room), the aims of the course, and the assessment objectives (this had to be done backwards – once we knew what we wanted the exam papers to look like, we could decide what to assess!). The interesting part was responding to the objections about the current syllabus (many and diverse). There was a constant tension between idealism (passion at times) and pragmatism (though this was fortunately handled with good humour). The IB diploma course has high standards; in some countries it leads to university credit (and so has to be challenging), yet it is sat by people who are not native English or Spanish speakers, and some subjects, notably History, are not always taught by subject specialists.

After three days, a proposal document was written which will be published online and opinion polls taken. Academics will scrutinise it for quality and, over the next two years, the proposals will be refined into something we hope will be workable, yet challenging.

I was struck by the process; the IBO want to make something that is the best it can be, something not shaped by governmental concerns, but by its vision. The IBO wants its pupils to understand other cultures and the events that have shaped our work today. They want them to work independently, to research and make judgements. In many ways seeking to fulfil this vision was what was most enjoyable about the time in The Hague. What was hardest? Thinking about what pupils will be interested in in 2021! I wonder how many other schools have thought that far ahead and are, indeed, planning their syllabus for 10 years hence?

The ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures above – of the village of Paschendale, scene of some of the fiercest fighting of the entire war - show very clearly the scale of the devastation. But as time passes, trees grow, grass returns, the birds begin to sing once again, and everything begins to look very normal. Here at Hailyebury we attempt to avoid these pitfalls by introducing some of the personal stories of Old Haileyburians who lost their lives during the War, in order to give our pupils a closer connection with the places they are seeing.

No longer is the imposing Thiepval Memorial merely an impressive stone monument, but the place where we can find the names of 37 OHs whose bodies were never found, including Percival Ram, Head of School in 1915, who died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme at the age of 19. Similarly, not only does the Menin Gate in Ypres contain the names of some 40 OHs, but the inscriptions that adorn its vast facades were composed by another Haileybury Old Boy, Rudyard Kipling. We are very lucky at Haileybury to have a fantastic archive which allows us to obtain these details (the school’s Roll of Honour).

There are certainly some sobering statistics, such as the 740 Old Boys who died during World War One, or the fact that, in the first 100 years of its existence, 9% of Haileybury’s pupils died in conflict. Yet the purpose of this research is about far more than simply trying to find sad stories, as plentiful as they might be. Instead, by learning about people such as Percival Ram, and by finding out what they were like - whether they were sporty, or whether they acted in the school play, or simply what their hobbies were - we can start to appreciate the real impact of the Great War on society. It is not just that countless millions never came home, but that each and every one of those was a real person, who – for all the differences of time - were very similar to you or me.

The First World War has now passed out of living memory, with the last British combat veteran, Harry Patch, having died in 2009 at the ripe age of 111. Ensuring that we remember the sacrifice of those who never returned has now passed to our generation, and this remains a central objective of our study of the period, as well as our Battlefields Trip. It is my sincere hope that, by personalising the trip in this way, our pupils will gain a huge amount from the experience. Do you feel this is justified and how do you bring history alive for your pupils?

Certainly in the past, debating competitions were won by the best actors, those who thought through their gestures in intricate detail and used odious, sycophantic phrases like ‘honourable judges’ and ‘esteemed opposition’. Equally now, the winners seem often to be rather intense children, speaking as if they were the bus in Speed: if they drop below a certain high speed then they will blow up.

I am very much in favour of debating based on substance and intelligent engagement with ideas, rather than over-formal speech-making; yet, there is a place for speaking in a pleasant, persuasive manner. Perhaps the best combination is a speaker who is both intellectually and personally engaging. As I said at the start, people want their leaders to be natural. Being natural does take a lot of practice…don’t you agree?