Page 2 - Malvern Buzz - Autumn 2020
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MALVERN BUZZ
SPOTLIGHT
STEPHEN HOLROYD, DEPUTY HEAD: CURRICULUM
Stephen Holroyd studied Economics and Economic History at Leeds University and went on to Warwick University to complete his PGCE. Over the last 30 years he has fulfilled a variety of educational management roles in addition to his teaching, and this September he took up the new position of Deputy Head: Curriculum.
Buzz met with Stephen and asked him to tell us what the new role of Deputy Head: Curriculum means for the College, its pupils and for him.
“When I was younger I wanted to be an architect – and after thirty years at Malvern I find myself applying my creativity and holistic thinking to build educational structures within which the whole educational edifice can function. Schools should always be dynamic, flexing and changing to respond to events and social contexts, and so for example, when we suddenly found ourselves teaching fully online during lockdown with the unprecedented cancellation of all external examinations, I led a team to support our staff to make the best use of the IT platforms already embedded into the school. And because I fundamentally believe that all change can be turned to positive use, and that creativity should be built into our approach to our curriculum, in that same period of lockdown I led the development of bridging courses for the GCSE going into the Sixth Form and for pupils leaving us to go to university. As well as leading the Economics Dept, being IB coordinator, a senior IB examiner, workshop leader and ISI Inspector, over my time at Malvern I have also built stage sets for the theatre, run Dof E gold, tutored, been deputy Housemaster, and run boys’ hockey, the work experience programme and the Sixth Form centre, amongst other things. One of the aspects I value most about the College is the wraparound nature of the experience, and this new role allows me to use the entire breadth of my three decades of experience at Malvern to draw everything together: the pupils’ lives in the classroom and outside it, to help them make the very most of the enormous smorgasbord of opportunity that the College affords them. Perhaps more than anything I bring enthusiasm to the role. I have a deep conviction about the power of education and the central role that it plays in shaping successful societies.
My new role is a brand-new position at Malvern and the idea behind it is to have someone with a complete keystone overview of our whole education programme. It’s therefore designed to coordinate the individual parts of the extremely
complex ‘machine’ so that they are all pulling in the same direction to enable the final outcome to be far greater than the sum of the individual parts. But it’s more than this. I support the Headmaster and the staff by creating a large number of highly effective teams around the College, to empower those teams to make independent decisions within the pedagogical vision of the Head and SMT, and then to provide staff with the structures and support to enable them to make those decisions in their own area of focus, whether that be academic leadership in subject departments, effective individual classroom teaching, empowering pupils to design and drive their own educational leadership opportunities through the Super Curricular Academic Enrichment Programme, or to increase the smooth running of a choc-full and fiendishly complicated Co-Curricular Programme.
Our current curriculum gives all of our pupils multiple avenues to succeed, and experience transformation whilst at Malvern. But I also believe that we are in a period of change from a strong foundation – we’re looking to develop new ideas and curriculum plans which draw on the development of our Malvern Qualities, to focus on skill development for lifelong learning, and provide increasingly individualised opportunities for pupils to design their own learning within the academic rigour provided by the external examination systems. An excellent example of this is our Foundation Year Passport, Transferable Skills programme and the new Foundation Year curriculum for Year 9.
This role provides an unprecedented opportunity to draw together conceptually and operationally the different parts of the school so that parents, pupils and teachers have a much more holistic overview of what the learning experience is, I don’t see it as parceled up into packages, it’s all part of the same thing.
I am very much looking forward to engaging with Prep Schools and prospective parents to talk about the Malvern Curriculum and hope to welcome you to our Campus at some future point.”
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