The Victorian 2014 QUEEN VICTORIA SCHOOL 18 29
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The Victorian 2014 QUEEN VICTORIA SCHOOL 18 29 Contents 1 Vision Statement 2 From the Head, Wendy Bellars 7 Notes from the Chairman 8 A Commissioner 32 50 9 From the Senior Deputy Head 10 From the Senior Monitor 11 The Norman MacLeod MacNeil Trust Fund 12 Grand Day 16 Captain John McDermid 20 The Houses – Cunningham House 22 Haig House 24 Trenchard House 52 60 26 Wavell House 36 Sport – Rugby, Hockey, Football, Athletics, Badminton, Inter-House Competition 50 Cromlix House 52 School Activities 58 French 62 Primary 7 77 Maths 79 English 62 102 92 Music 98 Armed Forces Day 100 Duke of Edinburgh Award 102 CCF 116 Staff QUEEN VICTORIA SCHOOL 1 Vision Statement Ethos of Defence, and through it to the personnel of the Queen Victoria School embodies, demonstrates Armed Forces. It provides a Service benefit by and promotes the following values: offering stability and continuity of valued Scottish • Integrity and honesty education to the children of serving military • Respect and responsibility personnel who are Scottish or who have served • Justice and equality in Scotland. • Compassion and empathy Pastoral Academic Queen Victoria School aims to ensure that at least The School strives to help each pupil realise his or one adult member of staff takes a continuous, her individual academic potential to the full at each proactive interest in the development of each pupil, stage of his or her school life. meeting with him or her regularly and providing both structured and responsive discussion. Through its Non-Academic boarding house structures the School provides a The School strives to provide a wide and diverse valid and valuable alternative to the pupil’s home range of extra-curricular activities to develop the environment during term times. Partnership with whole person. parents and carers is welcomed. The School encourages parents and carers to involve Civic and Service Responsibility themselves actively in their children’s learning and Queen Victoria School is an asset to the Ministry in the life of the School. Board of Her Majesty’s Commissioners For The Government of Queen Victoria School, Dunblane Patron Mrs L Hepburn HRH The Duke of Edinburgh KG KT OM GBE Colonel C Knightley Group Captain J G Leggat Chairman Rear Admiral R Lockwood CB Mr A J C Plumtree Professor B McGettrick Mr I K Ritchie FRCSEd (Orth) Commissioners Mr C Ross The Rt Hon Lord Carloway QC The Lord Justice Clerk Major General (Retd) D A H Shaw CBE MDA Major General N H Eeles CBE (GOC Scotland) Colonel (Retd) A P W Campbell Head Mr J Cummings Mrs W Bellars Captain P E Du Vivier RN Mrs C L Ford Secretary and Treasurer to HM Commissioners Mrs K Forsyth Stephen Dougan, School Business Manager 2 QUEEN VICTORIA SCHOOL Colour Party. From the Head – Grand Day 2014 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of all ages, and thank you for October last year. We asked you what was most important to you being with us for our Grand Day Prizegiving and Parade. about QVS; what if anything you would like us to stop doing; and what if anything you’d like to see us do, which we don’t do already. The American comedy writer James Thurber – of whom some of you Thank you for your responses, which were significant in quantity, may have heard – used to write very amusingly about his own family. thoughtful, helpful and in some cases usefully detailed. We asked He had a great-aunt, who was of considerable age when electricity parents, staff and pupils to respond to the same questions. All three was introduced to households in their area of the United States. She groups gave helpful and insightful responses – and the triangulation struggled to understand what electricity was, and remained of having three sets of respondents was useful too. convinced for the rest of her life that if you didn’t put a plug into the socket on the wall, the electricity would drip out of it and pose a real So what do we value about QVS? There was a welcome consistency danger to the residents of the house, especially if the socket were left of response across all three groups. “Security, Stability and Support” empty overnight. Similarly, the grandmother of one of our front desk would sum up very well what is most important to us all. Underneath staff here at QVS struggled to understand how modern forms of those broad headings there are specifics, such as “a good education” energy work. When told that a power-cut was affecting the home of – by far the most popular response from the pupils; the amazing and one of her sons and his family, she lamented the fact that they had no diverse opportunities offered to pupils by the School; our Ceremonial heating, no oven and no hob to use; “But they’ll be all right,” she traditions, Grand Day, the Parades and Chapel; Piping, Drumming said. “After all, they’ve got the microwave.” and Dancing; sports; the Combined Cadet Force; the Duke of Edinburgh Award; the Library; School trips and socials. And there’s We tend to associate such stories with the elderly. However … QVS, more – but for now, let me look at what we’ve been up to in these along with a large swathe of Central Scotland, suffered a power cut areas over the past year. just before Christmas, at 0719 hours one Thursday. Once we had fed the school cereal and juice for breakfast – by torchlight – I had time to Education: what we do is about helping the pupils to learn, and to ask the Housemasters how their pupils were getting on. “They’re apply their knowledge, every day. It’s not just about exam passes and fine,” said Mr Lear. “Most of them are on their phones or iPads. But what they go on to do when they leave. Having said that, however, it’s they keep asking me what’s happened to the wifi!” Similarly in not just the Scottish Government which is interested in what it calls Trenchard: Mr Bush said that most of the pupils were very happily “positive and sustained” destinations for school leavers. We have a playing games on their iPads – but in a moral tale reminiscent of the tremendously impressive range of “next step destinations” for this parable of the wise and foolish virgins, he added, “Except for those year’s leavers. They have already done extremely well, and I who forgot to plug them in to recharge last night!” congratulate them all on that. I also wish them every success in life beyond the School. Ah, the iPads – what wonderful learning aids they are proving to be – in all sorts of ways! One of our S6 is going on to a full GAP year in Australia, appointed against considerable competition. Two of our leavers are going on to You maybe remember being asked to take part in a survey, back in Forth Valley College and others, we hope, to other Colleges. And a QUEEN VICTORIA SCHOOL 3 Cunningham House prefects. Haig House prefects. stunning eight out of our 26 S6 leavers already have unconditional The pupils, of course, don’t see iPads as solely an aid to learning. I offers to university, including three to St Andrews. Of the seventeen can almost hear parents groaning, “No, of course they don’t.” But applicants holding conditional offers through UCAS – the Universities interestingly it wasn’t the ability to play games that pupils commented and Colleges Admissions Service – all have very reasonable on in the survey. “IPads [are] better for our work,” they wrote – conditions to meet, and again they are from very reputable amongst many specific examples of why that was the case, “and to universities. Thanks are due to Miss Phipps and Mrs Adams, for all contact our parents.” The use of Skype and Face Time was the work they do in the Careers department, and of course to all who specifically mentioned. There are always unexpected developments, have taught and otherwise supported these young people as they with any innovation, of course – and I don’t think anyone was make their post-QVS choices – including you, their families. prepared for the moment when a House tutor called in on a pupil one evening, to be told, “My mother wants to ask you about something, Within School, Mr Shaw has been leading on a great deal of work to sir” and have the pupil thrust the iPad at him, whereon was said drive up academic standards even further. The introduction of pupil’s mother, in real time, saying, “Hello, Mr X; I’m sorry my hair’s monthly Academic Rewards, funded by the Commissioners, has been wet, I’m just out of the shower.” Perhaps we need to build something a growing success this year, adding to the more general reward about that into our iPad protocols. schemes offered by Head’s Commendation letters and the whole-school reward programme which is being constantly refined by Keeping in contact with their parents came through in the survey as the Behaviour Management Group. tremendously important to pupils, as did the support that they feel they get from QVS when they are apart from their families. “We all Teachers have been hard at work getting to grips with the new have one thing in common,” one wrote. “You’re surrounded by people courses at National 4 and National 5, including the internal in the same situation,” wrote another. A third said that QVS provided assessments for National 4 and the recent exams for National 5.