"If we cannot address the problem of how to educate our young people in inspirational and appropriate ways, we risk a future workforce that is totally unskilled and unsuited to tomorrow's job market," Prof Steve Furber The Royal Society Report on the teaching of IT released Jan 2012

Challenging words which schools need to respond to! To assist me to understand Roedean’s current position on the provision of IT and computing skills, I talked to representatives from the IT, Maths and Physics departments. I wanted to hear what they are already doing to prepare a skilled workforce for tomorrow’s job market, and what more we should be doing.

“On Thursday I started teaching Decision Maths to a 62 Further Maths group. This is a change to our usual course. We discussed algorithms and their efficiency and looked at 2 particular sorting algorithms. Although it is not part of the course they want to write computer programs based on these algorithms. So on Saturday afternoon I decided to brush up on my programming skills and wrote two programs. I’m looking forward to discussing these with the girls and enabling them to start writing their own.” Maths department

“I would like to continue to offer some element of programming (on an informal basis) to those Sixth Form Physicists or potential Engineers who choose an extracurricular project.” Physics department

And the IT department:

“Girls learn Computing via HTML, Scratch, Logo, Animation and database concepts (including a little MySQL, thanks to SQLZoo!).  This works well alongside the design skills fostered by ICT and the creative use of web technologies together with, for example, movie creation and editing.”

In contrast to Mr Gove’s statement that current ICT lessons were "demotivating and dull”, this is not the case at Roedean and teachers are clearly proactive in responding to the interests of the students as they progress through the school.

However, the school recognizes that it needs to explore more deeply the challenge that the report has put forward. Whilst reviewing our IT offer, we are also reassessing the KS3 Design Technology curriculum. Ideas have been put forward to develop robotics and control as well as exploring how we can tie together the growing interest in graphics within Art with an extension of IT and programming skills.

 A critical part of the wider discussion, however, must be whether we should encourage students to take up Computing as an academic discipline at school whilst universities do not appear to be encouraging this. The Royal Society’s report provides ample evidence of the lukewarm reception of high profile universities to school qualifications in Computing or IT. The University of Cambridge undergraduate course information on Computer Science is quoted as follows:

“Computer scientists need to enjoy problem–solving, and be able to think logically and beyond what they’re taught. We don’t require any qualifications in computer science or any prior knowledge of programming. However, since the subject has strong mathematical groundings, it’s essential to have Mathematics at A Level/IB Higher Level. Science subjects are also viewed favourably – often more so than subjects such as IT, which are more vocational in nature”   www.cam.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses/compsci

This response has led to the situation currently experienced at Roedean where we do not currently offer A Level IT or Computing but instead have seen more students taking up Maths over recent years. This offer has been supplemented at sixth form level by extension classes in programming offered by an enthusiastic and knowledgeable teacher who has realized the need for students entering the workforce to have further skills in this area. This is yet another way by which girls can be drawn to take up difficult subjects and will be included in our assessment of how we can encourage more girls to engage more creatively in IT and Computing.

As a school we will continue to debate this topic. We are keen to inspire the girls with a fascination for this way of thinking and we also want to provide them with a sense of confidence as they step into what is often perceived as “a geeky male subject”. With the percentage of male applicants to university to study computing rising since 2007 from 84% to 87% they are going to need it.

On 13 December 2011 the possible discovery of the Higgs Boson particle was announced to the world:  you may well have taken note, I was a little caught up with the last two days of term.

What is the story about this and why mention it at the beginning of the school year? The story encapsulates the delights and excitement of academic study, of why people sit poring over books, computer sand microscopes, pick up paint brushes, rehearse for hours on the piano or the stage – it is that sense of wonder and discovery that comes from making sense of the world – that “aha” moment or that moment of complete absorption in a task, identified as the experience of flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

It is indeed what I hope our students experience, from time to time, both in their lessons and in their private study – that, “Wow, this is amazing!”

So what of this big story that broke just before the holidays? The following explanation is taken from The Economist Christmas issue which I hope I have understood sufficiently well to have drawn out the key elements for this article.

The wonder of physics, the article states, is to ask a question so obvious no one else would have thought of posing it. For example, why do apples fall to ground? Newton had the originality not only to ask this question, but also the brains to work out the answer, and along comes the theory of gravity.

In the 1960s a group of young researchers at Edinburgh University asked themselves where mass came from. They calculated that the reason why fundamental particles have mass is their interaction with a previously unknown field that permeates space which has since been named the Higgs field. This theory explains what is left over after a phenomenon called electroweak symmetry breaking: this activity, according to mathematical calculations, leaves a putative particle which has been labelled the Higgs Boson, whose possible discovery was announced last month.

Using the multibillion dollar Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the world’s premier particle physics laboratory, scientists have sought to locate and identify this particle. Having worked on this for many years, the scientists believed they had enough information to be able to release their news to the world in December.

Confirmation of the discovery would allow physicists to move into the exploration of something called Supersymmetry, which predicts the existence of a further set of particles. The CERN scientists believe these may be light enough to be made in the LHC; exploration of this would lead further in our understanding of the universe, this time into the world of the mysterious “dark matter” whose gravity holds the very galaxies together.

The Higgs Boson particle is also called the God particle (as a result of an editorial slip of the hand rather than theological input), but this has stuck as we come to understand through these calculations and experiments more of the inner workings of the universe and how it came to be. The scientists’ mastery of physics and mathematics demonstrate that these disciplines have the power to reveal the basic truths that underpin reality. Such insights come from years of study but also from imagination, thinking outside the box, and the ability to see links between unlikely facts which then come together to form an unexpected and beautiful symmetry.

And thus, the “aha” moment that comes from study. Whilst I am not anticipating quite such ground breaking experiences for the school community over the coming term, I very much hope that the combination of our students’ focus and interest and the enthusiasm and skill of our teachers will lead Roedean girls to appreciate further the delights of scholarship.

I was delighted to receive a copy of “Careers Advice for Ambitious Women” by Mrs Moneypenny, courtesy of her co-writer Heather McGregor. This is an excellent book for the new year as it encourages the reader, male or female, to approach their life with fresh energy for personal development.

Mrs Moneypenny begins with a chapter which should please all educationalists: the importance of first class qualifications. “What you know” is the foundation of any career and the more prestigious the educational establishment from which these are gained, the better.

In her entertaining presentation at our 2010 Speech Day, Mrs Moneypenny paid Roedean a great compliment by sharing her pleasure that her old school, St Mary’s Hall, had merged with us. This meant, she stated, that she could now put Roedean on her CV, which she felt gave an added boost to her many impressive qualifications.

Networking comes next in her list of how to get on, and here she shares many intriguing tips about how to make contacts with people that matter and then the importance of staying in touch with them. I particularly enjoyed her explanation on how to gatecrash career enhancing parties: you will have to buy the book to learn how!

Roedean has an excellent global network of women with varied and significant careers; I hope our girls will take note of Mrs Moneypenny’s advice on the value of keeping in touch and, indeed, of giving a hand up to those on the career ladder below you.

In words which I suspect will be echoed tomorrow by Eleanor Mills of The Sunday Times, our Head Girl’s Speaker for this month, the reader is told not to expect to have it all. Eleanor will be addressing this issue under the title, “The truth we hide from career women”: it will be interesting for our ambitious students to hear Eleanor speak on the challenge that career women today face of balancing work and home life. In the “Careers Guide for Ambitious Women” we are urged to set out career targets, to identify our priorities, and to organise our lives according to these.

A woman who might seem to do it all is Helena Morrisey who is given several pages of print by Mrs Moneypenny. Helena is CEO of Newton Investment Management, on the board of the Royal Academy of Arts, and has recently set up the 30% Club which aims to raise the percentage of female representation on UK corporate boards to 30% by 2015. On top of all this paid and pro bono work, Mrs Morrisey has found time to have no less than nine children. It is very satisfying to see that she was awarded a CBE for Services to UK Business in the New Year’s Honours List last week.

Mrs Moneypenny ends her book with the words she shared with the Roedean girls when she spoke in 2010. She states that there are no such words as “I can’t do it” for today’s young people. However, she insists that you must add one word to this - alone: “I can’t do it alone”. In order to be able to do it all, you need to enlist the support of others – true for men and women - but particularly applicable to women who will continue to need to balance a career with family life.

At the beginning of the new year this book is very much worth a read: it will help you write your list of resolutions for the months ahead and encourage you to find the energy to achieve these. I urge you to pick up a copy.

After Ronald Searle, girls’ schools were never the same again.

Even today, 70 years after their creation, the school girls of St Trinian’s are in fine form. The recent films starring Colin Firth and Rupert Everett breathed fresh life into these anarchic characters.

Their exploits on the hockey pitch, in the chemistry lab or in the boarding house were outrageous when first published and have continued to amuse over the years.

In the cartoons, the girls amassed a formidable arsenal of weapons, experimented with poisons, drank Scotch and kept boa constrictors as pets. In the films, first starring Alastair Sim as the headmistress and more recently, Rupert Everett, the girls imitate the gruesome goings-on in the cartoons, fixing this school firmly as a national institution.

The obituary in The Times (4 Jan 2012) of Ronald Searle, the creator of the girls from St Trinian’s, draws attention to the black world from which these cartoons originated. While the first schoolgirl cartoon was produced in 1941 for a London magazine, in the same year Searle was sent to the Far East to fight.

With the fall of Singapore, Searle was captured by the Japanese and spent the next four years as a PoW working on the Burmese-Thailand railway. From the age of 19 he watched his friends dying or being tortured on a daily basis, but he continued to sketch, risking severe punishment. Whilst in the camp he recorded the guards, the prisoners, determined to bear witness to the horrors of prison life; but the classrooms of grinning girls continued to flow from his pen during this period.

Over the years the girls of St Trinian’s have indeed influenced the nation’s perception of girls’ schools: hockey sticks and girls in uniform are associated with the wild world that Searle created. In his day these cartoons were deeply satisfying for the twist they brought to the edifices of respectability; the anarchy and malice of these school girls were the reverse of the public expectation of such establishments.

Today’s understanding, coloured by the more affectionate send up of modern society found in the films of 2007 and 2009, presents the girls of St Trinian’s as more attractive than their forbears. The geeks, chavs, posh tottie and emos all resonate with the teenage audience at which the films are aimed and provide an entertaining slant on the subgroups within youth culture of today.

The appeal of today’s films for me is the very clear, if rather laboured, presentation of girl power and what can be achieved through a sense of solidarity and community spirit. This is encouraged by the glamorous headgirl and the whacky headmistress who both know how to bring the girls together in the interests of their beloved school. Wild pop music and serious threat of closure seem to be the uniting elements which draw together this anarchic group of girls.

If I want to draw in a bit of energy before term begins and it is time to face my cheerful group of school girls, a quick dip into the mad world of St Trinian’s will get me charged up again and ready for action. I just hope that my school girls aren’t planning to do the same!

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