No.406 1988-1989 the PETERITE
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THE PETERITE No.406 1988-1989 THE PETERITE 1988-1989 No. 406 Contents PAGE PAGE Commemoration 2 Cricket 32 G.C.S.E. Results 6 Rugby 35 ' David Cummin 8 Hockey 40 Senior Common Room 9 Boat Club 42 • Chapel 14 Tennis 44 The Weather 15 Squash 47 Careers 15 Cross Country . 49 Music 16 Netball 50 Community Service . 18 Swimming 52 Societies 19 Athletics 53 School Trip 21 Oxford Cup 54 Combined Cadet Force 22 Archives 55 House Notes 24 Old Peterite Club 58 Commemoration 1989 Head Master's Report It was Lord Melbourne, the young Queen Victoria's first prime minister, who said, 'It is tiresome to hear education discussed, tiresome to educate and tiresome to be educated'. Not a few of you may be tempted to agree with him as, at the end of another busy school year and in a rather stuffy Sports Centre, you see me once again rise to deliver my annual Commemoration report. However, I hope that you will not find the proceedings too tedious:, this is an important if final occasion in the school calendar which allows us to welcome honoured visitors, to be edified by our guest of honour's words, to thank those who have done so much to make the year successful and to note the many and varied achievements of our pupils in academic and in other areas. My first duty is to tell you of the Dean's regrets in being unable this year to preside at Commemoration. However, I I am thereby provided with the opportunity of thanking you, Mr. Chairman, for taking his place and, on behalf; of all of us concerned with the School, of acknowledging your major contribution to its well-being in so many ] ways and at the expense of so much of your time. It falls to you as Vice-Chairman of the Governing Body and . Chairman of its Finance and General Purposes Committee to guide and advise on a whole range of policy decisions, '• and your energies have been recently further harnessed to your skilled and detailed chairmanship of our Appeal '89. Thank you for you dedication to the School and for your strong support in so much that we are trying to achieve. And it is no formality when we welcome each year to Commemoration the Lord Mayor and the Civic Party. St. Peter's is conscious of its place for centuries in the history of York, and it is a great honour for us to have its First Citizen with us this morning. We thank you, my Lord Mayor, and wish you a most successful term of office. Another pleasure is to have with us the Dean of Ripon, our Commemoration preacher. On behalf of all of us ' I thank him for his fine sermon. I was delighted when he accepted my invitation to come because I knew that we would be hearing not only a former chaplain of Lancing College but also the compiler of Words for Worship, a book which is the indispensable aid to head teacher up and down the country in their planning and conducting ! of school morning assemblies. Mr. Dean, your being with us is a privilege, and your sermon, fuelled with your understanding and experience of schools and young people, inspired us. Our guest of honour is well known to many of us. There could be no more appropriate testimony, as personified in John Shannon, to the links between the city of York and St. Peter's. He is a former governor of the School and a former parent, and the Robin Shannon Prize, presented by the Shannon family in memory of his son, is a continuing symbol of this latter fact. John Shannon, as so many of you know, has been Chairman of York Civic , Trust for many years, and all of us who have the privilege of living in this historic place have John Shannon to thank for fighting so hard, and successfully to preserve its beauty and to ensure that its treasures and delights will be appreciated and enjoyed by the generations that follow us. We look forward in a few minutes to his address and thank him warmly for the honour done to us by his being here today to present the prizes. Before turning to some of the details of this academic year I guess that you will expect me to mention the Appeal, I am happy to be able to tell you that Appeal '89 is well past the halfway mark and has reached a total so far . of over £300,000. This is extremely encouraging. We are enormously grateful to all those parents, Old Peterites and other well-wishers who have given so generously, and we are hopeful that our £500,000 target may be reached • in the coming months. Few of you will be unaware of the Appeal's objectives: the refurbishment of the Methodist i halls for drama and music, the adaptation of the Scott and Grove blocks as Mathematics and Modern Languages j centres, the replacement of the Junior School huts by a fine new building and the creation in the Old Gymnasium/Drama Centre of a much-needed Senior School library. We hope that in the coming weeks a start will be made on the Junior School and Library projects, and we hope that within the next year or so the green light can be given for the other developments. For the Senior School the library will, I believe, be a most significant addition to our facilities. My enthusiasm can be best indicated by our pondering the words of that great fourteenth * century patron of learning, Richard de Bury: : What pleasantness of teaching there is in books, how easy, how secret! They are masters who i teach us without rod or ferrule.... If you come to them they do not withdraw themselves; they do not chide you if you make mistakes; they do not laugh at you if you are ignorant. They are the mines of profoundest wisdom to which the wise man sends his son that he may dig out treasures. It is my strong wish that in the near future more of our pupils than at present will discover and relish that ! rich satisfaction which books can give. The success so far of Appeal '89 provides the means of making this and much else possible. New classrooms, more provisions for drama and music, an improved library: these are all urgent and important ' needs if we are to continue as a successful school at a time of unprecedented educational development and change. ! But new buildings for a Head Master to show proudly to prospective parents are not in themselves sufficient unless a school has a clear vision of what it is setting out to do. And it is in the context of what I perceive our aims to be that I wish to report on some of our recent achievements. Above all we must have an academic purpose - the pursuit of knowledge in its widest sense. I hope that our teaching and our curriculum produce something at least of Thomas Traherne's definition: Knowledge is that which does illuminate the sane, enkindle love, excite our care, inspire the mind with joy, inform the will, enlarge the heart, regulate the passions.... 2 It is certainly encouraging that two-thirds of our sixth form leavers last summer went on to university degree courses and that nine Peterites secured Oxford and Cambridge offers. We try too to be responsive to the modern educational requirements of our pupils, and I cite the following: our broad-based third year curriculum very much in line with the new national criteria; the expanding opportunities in Craft, Design and Technology with two GCSE options, new A level provision and enhanced staffing in the subject; the courses in personal and social education which we are about to introduce; the relatively straightforward supercession of O level by GCSE (though not without many extra demands on our teaching staff); the introduction of A level Business Studies; the ways in which the Second Master with Mr. Barton's computing and analytical skills have made our GCSE and A level option schemes so user-friendly. These are all indicators of a school - and its body of teachers - which wants what goes on in the classroom to be relevant, challenging and thorough. And just an afterthought on our academic record: I was amused to reach a reference to one of our most eminent Old Peterites of the century in the autobiography of the art historian, Kenneth Clark. Frank Pick, chief executive officer of London Passenger Transport in the 1930s, was influential in making that institution one of the chief influences on applied art and design of its day. Kenneth Clark describes Pick in these terms, 'He came from Lincolnshire and spoke very quietly with a Scunthorpe accent. He had been a scholar at St. Peter's School, York, but must have been largely self-taught....'. I hope that we are not leaving current Peterites quite as much to their own devices. I believe that we are right in putting first our aim to be academically strong and successful, but I believe too that schools must also be busy and exciting places in which creativity and physical fitness and happiness are also considered to be important values. Many of you will have heard at least some of our music in the past year: perhaps the formal occasions in the Minster such as today or the Carol Service or the Epiphany Procession; you may have been at one of our Chapel concerts, for instance Judas Maccabeus with Choral Society and School Orchestra, or the freshly introduced instrumental competition; there was the splendid Gala Charity Concert a few weeks back which acted as a marvellous showcase of our current musical standards; and there was the Ronald Smith piano recital, the first of what I hope may be termly visits from professional soloists or ensembles.