Mr. Pettitt spoke to Year 11 students Freda Lanigan and Natalie Strauch to discuss his journey as an educator, the challenges of the pandemic, the justification for private schooling, and the future of Highgate.
1. What initially drew you to working in education? Is it what you always wanted to do, or did you consider other career paths?
There’s a spirit of contrariness, because my father loathed schools and had deep suspicion when it came to anybody who worked in education. Teenagers do tend to have a desire to rebel, and so I suppose my rebellion was becoming interested in schools. I was fascinated by them and the way they operated, so the way I earned pocket money growing up was by working on summer schools. I started doing some activities as a leader, and when a teacher was away I would get asked to teach a bit of English. I spent my year abroad as part of my languages degree teaching English, and then during my gap year teaching at a prep school; so all these experiences were coming at me showing that I was clearly enjoying it.
So I suppose it was a combination of being told this was not a career my father wanted me to do (and therefore being interested out of a sense of adversity), and also finding that when I did look at it, I found it enjoyable. So no, I never seriously considered other things. I dallied with the civil service, and I dallied with publishing, but I didn't really pursue those seriously.
2. What do you enjoy the most about being Head of Highgate School?
There’s two aspects to that question; what's enjoyable about Highgate and what’s enjoyable about being Head. Being a Head, it's about having the opportunity to work within an organization you know quite a lot about, with a group of people you know well, in order to achieve changes or developments that pay off in the long term. And relative to a lot of other organizations and schools, I feel you have quite a lot of freedom here. You still have to work within constraints, but I really enjoy that sense of how will we achieve what we want, what will we do, how can we persuade people that it’s a good idea, etcetera. Really, the operational bit is the fun bit; it’s meeting you all, it’s teaching, it’s walking around it’s having chats, it’s meeting prospective parents and pupils. The operational stuff is intrinsically fun because it’s about people.
And then with Highgate, we don't have a glorious history that we have to worry about. We don’t have masses and masses of traditions that say what has happened in the past is going to tie our hands; when most people talk about Highgate, they talk about what’s happening now and what we’re achieving, rather than something like how many prime ministers we’ve had at our school. This means that we aren’t trapped by other people’s notions of what it is.
Additionally, it’s in a lovely part of London, it’s increasingly attracting applications from people from all parts of the city of different ethnicities, and we also have quite an international teaching staff. I also find that you don’t walk into a classroom discussion or common room discussion and find you’re in an echo chamber; people disagree with each other. I think people bring into Highgate an awful lot of themselves, and (I hope) they don’t just come into Highgate and start behaving the way Highgate wants them to, which I don’t necessarily find in a lot of other schools.
3. What are some examples of student-run activities or events that you find interesting to witness as Head?
The most exciting things for me are the bread and butter stuff, involving teaching and how seriously inventively pupils respond to things in the classroom and then take it outside. When you open up the Windhover or one of the other school’s magazines, you know you're getting just the tip of the iceberg. You see a particularly good piece or work or a well crafted poem or beautiful painting, but you know that the roots of that go way deeper. It's the interactions of the pupils with each other and working alongside their teachers.
What my colleagues and I always try to come back to is how do we prevent teaching from beings all about outcomes and exam results. How do we make teaching feel like something where people engage with what is important to them at that moment, with a teacher who cares desperately about their subject. It’s brilliant when it spills over into events, but it always seems those events are always a condensed version of what that best sequence of lessons are going to be.
4. 2020 has been a very unprecedented year. What do you think is the biggest challenge facing students and teachers is during the pandemic?
I think the biggest thing is social. School is about being together, about being with people you may not have chosen to be with, but you learn how to get on with them and develop some of the strongest friendships you’ll ever have in your life. Making contact across non-physical ways has been the most difficult to predict, and plays out differently in different people’s lives.
For people in exam years, the challenge is not knowing. I mean, for 70 years people have been finishing school with A levels, and that’s sort of disappeared without saying what’s replacing it. All the people who are supposed to know the answers, from the prime minister down, don’t know the answers. You intellectually understand that they can’t know the answers, but that doesn’t help you; it’s quite discombobulating.
From the teachers point of view, I think they’ve done a brilliant job learning how to teach online and keep lessons live and responsive. What I‘ve found odd is how much I underestimated the extent to which just getting to see anybody at any part of the day made running a school easy. You now have to make an appointment on Zoom to talk to somebody, whereas walking across the quad I can just come say hello. Just all these things, such as standing in the lunch queue or standing in the quad; not having the number of ways in which I learn about people in the business of observation and contact has been really odd.
But it hasn’t been nearly as bad for us as it has for some schools. We’ve had the infrastructure to keep learning going, so I’m trying to be very conscious of the external challenge, and how to help partners.
5. In 2019, you debated the motion "private schools are bad for society" with journalist Fiona Miller. Could you share what you discussed, and mention whether the pandemic has changed any of your thoughts on the subject?
That was really good fun! It was quite a scary moment, going up against Fiona Miller, who is this highly polished, authoritative, and intelligent opponent. Her line was that independent schools contribute towards (and are a symptom of) a more unequal society. She argued that if everybody was to go to a state-run school, and there wouldn’t be choice over school, we would find there would be a greater mixing of people from different backgrounds, and we would have less problems as a society at large.
Having been at a comprehensive school myself in a one-school town, I can completely see the argument that at a comprehensive school you do get everybody together. However, the experience of many children is that their schools aren’t comprehensive because in London, where you live determines where you go to school. So in Haringey, in the schools that draw from areas where the housing stock is lowest, you find that you're getting less wealthy, more disadvantaged students all congregating in the same schools. And then in more affluent areas of the borough (like Muswell Hill for example), you find the schools aren’t comprehensive in intake.
That’s nobody's fault, but what we can do (other than having a balloting system that tends to be quite unpopular) is recognize that society has inequalities in it, and attempts to try and use education to sort out all inequalities is usually going to founder. What independent schools can do is work nimbly with schools that may find it more difficult to provide the experience that may be happening in a great comprehensive, which is what we're trying to do at the London Academy of Excellence. The transfer of experience, and the translation of additional benefit from a school that is well-resourced to a school that is less well-resourced and the learning that could happen on that front, is actually a good solution.
One thing we did during lockdown is help raise money to buy laptops for pupils in one of Fiona’s schools. She was very gracious that we were trying to find a local and swift solution to the fact that some students were not able to access the learning they were being offered during lockdown. Where else could that have come from, considering the central government took ages to do it, and still hasn’t completed doing it?
Because children must be one of the most important parts of our society, what we do with and for them is critical, so I understand why education becomes the political football for people trying to work out how to respond within a crisis. However, we need to recognize school type is not a proxy for inequality; it’s all the things that come with being less well off. Only by having joined our healthcare, housing, extra-curricular activities and education will we get to a point where a child who grows up in a disadvantaged background will be able to access good educational outcomes. If you ask me, we’re sort of fiddling while Rome burns by wondering if comprehensive is the right thing or not, or whether single sex education is important, if there are young people who aren’t getting a hot meal a day in one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
5. What does Highgate’s partnership with LAE Tottenham entail?
There are two principal characteristics. One is that we promise to provide at least 5 full time teachers at no cost to the school, which effectively gives them additional resources so that they can have either smaller classes, or more courses, and so on. We have brought a number of other independent schools (there are about 8) who also help by either bringing teachers, or providing extracurricular activities, or inviting pupils to join activities with them. There is just a general enriching of the pupil’s experience, beyond what the fantastic teachers that they employ themselves provide.
The second thing is that we provide the governors. Not all of them, but we are effectively five people associated with Highgate are the trustees for the trust, which has the contract from the government to run the school. And I am one of the trustees, and I am deputy head of governors. So whilst more of my time is spent worrying about Highgate and making Highgate work, it’s not a sort of glory project; I know there are 500 young people whose education and experience, and welfare and safeguarding and so on and so forth depend on the work that we as the trustees are making the executives do.
I would say with the teachers, it's not only that we are providing “free teaching;” we are transferring some of the culture that goes with Highgate. So that’s the way we run things, such as the idea of teaching beyond exams. So those arrangements are true of all the state schools and independent school partnerships which have been building up over the last 30 years. But probably what is unusual about ours is that it has morphed into a sense of running one school with others connected to it.
The more difficult thing is trying to make sure that the opportunities that young people here and the young people at Tottenham have to get to know each other don’t feel imposed. But we do think student-student connections are incredibly valuable, and making sure those connections become friendships that outlive the experience of being at Highgate.
6. How would you like to see Highgate evolve overtime? What would you like to see the school to accomplish in the next 5, 10, 15 years?
Top of the list is becoming better at looking after people better who come from minority background and and attract more people from different ethnic background. We want to ensure that they don’t feel like they have to change, so they don’t have to come here and feel they need to pretend to be white or middle class to access the Highgate experience. I think after this past summer and what happened with Black Lives Matter, it triggered a worldwide response that I think is working its way through every organization.
I’d really like to see sustainability become something where people aren’t just rolling their eyes, and actually get excited about it. I’d like to see a world where nobody drove to school unless they really had to, and all the other things related to sustainability. If we could crack that one, and some of our selfishness about the planet.There’s fantastic things we do as a school; the plastic bottles the straws, is brilliant. But when it actually comes to being inconvenient, we’re still fighting shy of that I think.
There’s so much on the charitable and philanthropic front, such as increasing the number of bursaries we have. We’ve got 7% of students in the senior school on full fee equivalent bursaries, which is 89 or 90 people out of 1,2000. That feels to me like quite a small number if you’re of that number. So we’re actively looking at whether we should be introducing bursaries into the Junior School, to increase the number to at least 10% or more if we can.
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