by Karen Miles
Looking behind the picture postcard exterior of Hurstpierpoint College, Karen Miles wasn’t sure what she would find or whether she would like it. Her interview with Heather Beeby, Head at Hurst Prep School, left her surprised and more than a little inspired.
I’d expected to pick up something – some hint of dissent, some feeling of dissatisfaction – but there was nothing. So I tried again, calculating that if I kept chatting to the parents of this fee-paying school in the heart of middle class Sussex, it wouldn’t be long before somebody had something interesting to say about it. As a parent myself, I had sounded out a dozen or so state and independent schools over the years, mingling at the school gates with mums and dads to find out strengths and weaknesses. You might know the kind of thing: mulling over the good but also the bad at the place – off-beam behaviour, sloppy teaching, soft leadership.
But at Hurstpierpoint College Prep School, my questions brought a near wall of praise for the school, and particularly for its Headmistress Heather Beeby. The cunning journalist’s plan to find out about the school’s weaknesses before interviewing Beeby – now three years into her headship – wasn’t going as it should.
Time and time again, parents’ faces lit up with something approaching evangelism at the mention of Heather Beeby’s name. They described a consistent picture: the warm and understanding woman, available and visible to children and parents alike, inspirational, caring and compassionate, firm and decisive, scarily efficient, working, working, working. They outlined how she moved quickly to sort out problems when they were raised: poor behaviour in the playground that was jumped upon; underperforming children reminded firmly and instantly of the way forward; scared new entrants happy to hold her hand in the foyer; alterations to the day’s menu to assuage those with the appetites of lions. For goodness’ sake, I even came across sets of parents who had moved their children from Beeby’s last school, St Christopher’s in Hove, to be reunited with her.
With perseverance I gathered a smattering of less complimentary material, even if I do have to hang my head in slight desperation at some of its content: one mother’s comment that some classroom displays might be better; another’s that a few teachers’ summaries on their child’s reports could be more useful. And it would seem that perhaps the scholarship awards are not always as generous at age 11 as Hurst’s information leads parents to believe.
I also unearthed a fair few complaints about problems parking at the site. But even here the grumbles were relatively muted and half-apologetic. The bun-fight for car space in the mornings follows a rapid increase in pupil numbers. But which parent in their right mind wouldn’t be happy with their child being part of a prep school where pupil numbers have risen by 25% to 250 in the last three years? And who could really complain about expansion when the children of Years 7 and 8 have moved into a share of the College’s newly-opened £5 million academic building development in a move designed not only to enhance the classrooms at their disposal but also to ease their transition into the Senior School in Year 9?
Talking to Beeby is an interesting and inspiring experience. From here it’s possible to understand the parent fan club. She’s someone who doesn’t fit the stereotypical profile of a prep school head – a woman, a wife and mother, state-educated and with a strong sense of social justice. “I’m not interested in developing children who think that they’re better than everyone else – that slightly nauseating public school gloss,” she points out.
Her qualities were spotted by Tim Manly shortly after he was appointed Headmaster of all of Hurstpierpoint College in January 2005. Hurst’s dreamy 140-acre campus – with its views of the South Downs, impressive flint buildings dominated by the grand chapel and beautiful cricket, rugby and hockey pitches – was in need of a wake-up call.
As Manly set to work – upping the ante on the school’s underperforming academic core – Beeby was happily ensconced at Brighton College’s wholly-owned subsidiary and prep school, St Christopher’s. She’d been basking in a recent accolade for ‘visionary’ leadership from the Independent Schools Inspectorate. It was only when six of her best pupils began to view Hurst that she became really aware of the school.
When the job came up to lead Hurst Prep School, Beeby realised she was ready for a new challenge: “Tim Manly had such a tremendous energy and I knew I wanted to be somewhere where things would really be happening. I knew that somewhere like Hurst wouldn’t come up again in a hurry.”
After switching to the Hurst camp in September 2006, Beeby moved to improve academic standards by imposing the system of challenge grades at the Prep School, following Manly’s lead in the Senior School. This system gives parents an email report every six weeks on their child’s progress towards target grades that are designed to challenge them on every subject.
Some staff chose to move on with the changes that Beeby imposed in her new domain – as they had done in the Senior School under Manly. The rest were mentored in an unprecedented way alongside a new regime of staff training that has now been woven into the fabric of the school. Beeby is unapologetic: “When I arrived, learning was all about fun, but it’s not all about fun. I want the children here to be inspired.”
The after-school activity programme was expanded with the aim of inspiring life-long interests for Hurst children. At the heart of this remains the Chapel Choir – attracting large numbers of applicants compared to table tennis, football, performance poetry, gardening, rugby, film club and swim squad, to name but a few – indicating the popularity of singing at Hurst Prep. Quite a feat in such a sporty school.
Another innovation is the enrichment programme. This is a system of optional termly projects for ‘GTi’ children, aimed at stretching the minds and the independent study skills of the “gifted, talented and/or interested”, as Beeby explains. From this base, final year Prep pupils in Year 8 are also more able to handle the project-based presentation required at the Senior School for those applying for academic scholarships there. In turn, these fledgling skills will be developed to help fulfil the rigours of the International Baccalaureate Diploma programme that Hurst plans – subject to the agreement of the IB Board – to run alongside A-Levels in the Sixth Form from 2011.
Meanwhile, the Common Entrance exam for entry to the Senior School has been scrapped. Is this Hurst dumbing down? Not surprisingly, Beeby argues it is not. She calls Common Entrance an “old fashioned examination” that is based heavily on factual knowledge and says it is under review by many prep school heads: “The ability of children to learn independently is not tested by Common Entrance and I would argue that this will be the most important skill we can teach our children. Children at Hurst work to the same academic levels as those who follow Common Entrance but they work more independently and creatively.”
Beeby and Manly accept children with a wider span of raw academic ability than some independent schools but expectations are high for each recruit. “Our aim is for the top of the tree, for each child to do as well or better here than in any other school,” states Beeby. The belief is that Hurst must produce men and women of the future who can survive and prosper with the fittest as well as interact effectively with those around them, producing their own solutions for success and happiness in an increasingly competitive and sometimes troubled world.
“We’re preparing people for the big jobs but they also need to think about the world that we live in. Education has to be about children growing up and being forward thinking and looking beyond themselves,” she argues. For anyone not used to seeing the level of care, expertise and facilities at somewhere like Hurst – use the word privilege if you like – this sounds like an important lesson for these children to learn.
As a result, Beeby chairs the College’s Eco-Hurst committee, a cause that she is working hard to push onto the agenda of all 900 or so pupils within Hurst’s Pre-Prep, Prep and Senior Schools. She wants to expand the environmental programme, including setting up a one acre farm on Hurst’s ample site that will educate pupils about food production and sustainability and will also foster problem-solving skills and business enterprise. There are moves to power one of the girls’ boarding houses in the Senior School with solar panels and to install a ground source pump. There is more on Beeby’s mind, including the introduction of a ‘Year of Sustainability’ throughout the College and bringing in a host of other permanent environmental initiatives in co-operation with West Sussex County Council – reducing the waste produced by Hurst, for example. There’s fire in her eyes at the mention of the masses of plastic water bottles discarded by pupils every day.
Beeby is keen to open the minds of the College’s pupils to the plight of the less well-off. Last year the Prep School raised nearly £14,000 for the orphans’ charity Open Arms Malawi. Much of the total was based on parents ‘lending’ £10 to their sons and daughters to put towards money-making projects where all profits were then donated to the charity. This led to the creation of hundreds of philanthropic Prep School entrepreneurs.
This year immediately after the Haiti earthquake, the whole Prep School responded alongside the rest of the College to raise a significant sum to assist the aid programme. Leading, as ever, by example, Beeby bid for the ‘privilege’ of abseiling from the Chapel tower. Not an easy abseil for the experienced let alone for an absolute beginner!
And Beeby is pushing for more projects to link Hurst to its locality, underlining the school’s ethos from its ownership by the Woodard Corporation. Woodard schools are charged with nurturing and enriching each child with a sense of Christian community. Lower down the years Beeby sees her job as getting her children to help others – singing in the community, for example. “We constantly need to be looking to develop children who contribute to the world where they live and who do things for other people. In the end it could be said that it is giving that makes people most happy,” she concludes.
Meanwhile Beeby didn’t get her second award for leadership by losing sight of Hurst’s core business of academic pursuit. In 2007, the Independent Schools Inspectorate judged the leadership from Manly, Beeby and also Michèle Finnegan, head of Hurst Pre-Prep School, to be “outstanding”.
“We are alert to our children and to what makes them tick. It’s about looking for the ways a child can contribute and by acknowledging that – and not just academically. We expect them to do great things and by and large they do,” states Beeby.
Hurstpierpoint College
College Lane, Hurstpierpoint,
West Sussex BN6 9JS
Tel: 01273 833 636
Email: info@hppc.co.uk
www.hppc.co.uk
