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Let me ask you a question.
How would you create a new school? Something brand new. You are given a blank slate and you can decide what to do. Quite a tantalising opportunity… Perhaps you would build in your own image and create a school that reflects your vision and values. It sounds like the role of a lifetime.
What if your new school was the offspring of one that was already successful, so successful in fact, that it had a reputation as being ‘The world’s most academic school’? That might change your thinking. Not so much big shoes to fill as big shoes to create.
Welcome to my world! Eighteen months ago I was given the privilege of launching Cardiff Sixth Form College Cambridge. The original Cardiff Sixth Form College (CSFC) had proven so successful that demand for places, particularly from overseas students, had exceeded supply many years ago. The time had come to open a new branch and replicate this success.
Many aspects of our new school were brought across from Cardiff. We have our colleagues in Wales to thank for assistance in many areas such as curriculum planning, teaching materials, pastoral support and for an understanding of the incredible academic culture of CFSC. Our new school could not simply be a clone, however, no matter how successful the original. Who would be inspired to work and study in a mere facsimile of a successful school? We needed identity. There needed to be a reason to join a CSFC college that was in Cambridge.
The answer now seems obvious to me, but came only after some dedicated mulling and daydreaming… What can you do with able and ambitious students who are studying A-levels in a city which has one of the world’s leading universities? The answer – you use the university. You use the work of the academic departments, the museums, the teaching hospital and the science parks to help your students to be inspired by those at the cutting edge. We call it The Cambridge Edge.
This idea became a programme of ‘super curricular’ activities – student enrichment that is based on developing academic interest beyond the A-level curriculum. Our ethos is that we can learn from those outside the college. One route to this is to attend university public lectures, another is to create links with local enterprises to facilitate onsite bespoke tours. As we have become more established we are also forming direct links with academic staff and have hosted seminars in our college on topics such as the use of economic modelling on covid cases and on the future of AI. Our student leadership team used the idea of reaching out to invite speakers from Cambridge University and UCL to their ‘Women in STEM’ seminar to celebrate International Day of Women and Girls in Science.
We try to encourage students to engage and network with such speakers to help them see that they can engage with academics and can discuss interests from a common ground. As you may imagine, for most of our students this is often the first time they have spoken to an academic, let alone one from such a prestigious university. We view such interactions as steps in confidence building that can lead to a student enjoying and succeeding in subsequent university admissions interviews.
This leads to the idea of the enthusiast. A central message to our students is that the people working at the university and associated enterprises are not scary, unreachable titans. They are enthusiasts. They do the work they do for the love of it and will be interested in students who engage with them about their work. An example of this was when one of our students, Sarah, attended a Cambridge science fair and plucked up the courage to speak with academics from the university about a medical topic she had read about. The conversation must have impressed the staff as it led to Sarah being given a personal tour of the Cambridge University department of Pharmacology. Sarah continued to look outwards and found a number of medicine-related work experiences, took part in MUN and won a national debating competition. She is now the proud holder of our very first Cambridge University offer for medicine.
We also learn from home-grown enthusiasts, in the form of CSFC alumni. We host mentoring sessions every half term when former CSFC students who are now studying at Cambridge University or at one of the top London universities, such as Imperial or UCL, join our students to discuss their journey and to pass on advice. Our year 13 students host these sessions with the idea that they are to become the next generation of mentors themselves.
The Cambridge Edge programme includes an invitation for our students to work on a project with university departments. We build connections with academic staff in the university based on student project choice. As an example, currently we have a student, Fernanda, who is working with the university’s Department of Chemistry on an algae-powered fuel cell. She hopes that the device can be used in rural parts of her home country of Angola to provide off-grid electricity generation.
Our first Cambridge Edge project nearly ended before it began when I initially told our student Cesare that, ‘no, you can’t build a nuclear reactor in the basement.’ Cesare is made of stronger stuff and produced a substantial risk assessment document to detail how he would mitigate against the risks of building a nuclear fusion device. He had also managed to bring on board Jamie Edwards, a PhD student at the university’s engineering department, as a mentor. Having established the ethos of reaching out to enthusiasts, I couldn’t very well block Cesare’s way and so his project began.
Cesare is now in the final term of his studies with us and has completed the construction of a functional, hand-built, nuclear fusor. He has presented the device both in the Dukes Colleges ‘Renaissance Scholars Symposium’ and in our very own ‘Nuclear Fusion Symposium’. This latter event was entirely created around Cesare and his fusor and included a presentation from Prof Eugene Shwageraus, the Professor of Nuclear Energy Systems at the engineering department of Cambridge University, to an audience of CSFC Cambridge and Cardiff students and students from local Cambridge schools.
It is still very early in the development of our new school but we have an established outward looking programme in the Cambridge Edge and it is helping us to form our own identity. You can get a glimpse of this at www.the-cambridge-edge.com
Long live the enthusiasts!