Winchester: good company, and who gets a word in

A leaver and three farewells

Historical account · A 2008 leaver’s reflection and farewell tributes published in 2014

Guy Francis had just left after five years when he wrote about them in the November 2008 Trusty Servant. He arrived suspecting that his Latin scarcely entitled him to the chapel pews his predecessors had warmed, and gathered that each generation of teachers remembered a better generation of pupils, a habit probably as old as teaching. The gap between the reputation and its current holders became a shared joke; belonging partly meant knowing how imperfectly one fitted. He saw the risks of a small world, too. Its rewards could become sufficient in themselves, and a friendship begun over tea or in the queue for a shower could lose its footing outside the routines that held it up. Yet for all his doubts, his strongest case for the education was the Common Room, and the company of particular adults.

The farewells in the 2014 Wykehamist put names to that company. John Falconer turns up in literature, music and house productions, arranging pieces for whatever performers were available – less of a compromise than it sounds, when the alternative is music nobody can play – and his work with community entertainers called for an attentive ear even when the song looked simple. It is a portrait full of pleasure, and it insists, quietly, that pleasure deserves care. The tributes are honest, too, about what close quarters ask of people: Barbara MacKinnon’s acknowledges her discomfort with the exposure of life in a housemaster’s family, and her decision to concentrate on teaching, which is more than most farewells find room for. Philip Nash is remembered for listening, humour and a preference for reason in discipline, a combination most of us would have been glad of at sixteen.

The College’s accounts

Institutional publication · Reports for the years ending August 2014 and August 2018

The College’s own reports are less romantic. The 2014 report describes a review of the lower years that produced new Div syllabuses, slightly shorter periods and some additional lessons, which is how breadth beyond the examined subjects usually arrives, as a decision about the ordinary week written up in the language of committees. The 2018 report has Shakespeare’s First Folio in use in English classes, medieval manuscripts in history and early scientific books in physics and biology, which a reader of something called Report and Financial Statements may not have expected. Even the Warden’s Stables had been put to work, as the Treasury – in a set of accounts, a word one expects to mean money – serving teaching and public display alike.

The same report has local primary pupils in the laboratories and the nature reserve, and researchers in the archives, though an opening of that kind, with its own purposes and arrangements, is not a place at the school. On places, the College is candid. Bursary provision was substantial, yet demand exceeded the funds available and the College was limiting awards, so that alongside the First Folio and the manuscripts there were children it could not afford to help, and it said so.

The inspectors

Inspection finding · 21–23 March 2023

Then came the inspectors, in March 2023. Both areas of educational quality were judged excellent, the word a school will quote, though the detail is more use to a reader. The inspectors found a small number of lessons, especially for younger pupils, too dominated by instruction to allow enough exploration of different approaches, which is inspectors’ English, more or less, for a teacher doing most of the talking. Elsewhere they watched pupils use Dante to discuss prisons, a pleasingly specific thing to find in such a report, and listen carefully to one another’s philosophical arguments.

Listening comes up again, less comfortably. A minority of pupils felt the school did not hear their views, and the inspection evidence partly supported the concern: a few said that quieter voices could go unheard despite the channels available. Channels, as anyone who was once a quiet pupil will remember, tend to work best for the people who need them least. The finding is dated, and partial, but it sends a reader back to Francis, and to teachers who each remembered a better generation of pupils than the one in front of them. Perhaps the better generation is always the one that got a word in.

Independent Schools Inspectorate, Winchester College, March 2023

Sources and limits

• A leaver’s reflection, colleagues’ affectionate tributes, the College’s own reports and an inspection are different kinds of evidence. Their particular observations cannot fix an unchanging school character, or speak for every pupil’s experience.
• We checked the passages in retained copies of the public originals. Archive and school PDF links may no longer work; this is a reading of dated sources, not an assessment of what the school provides now.