WIDENING OUR PERSPECTIVE
The Vision for Winchester College may have been a well-balanced and sophisticated document when it was published in 2021, but there was no doubt what the top-line was for journalists writing up the story. The College would for the first time in its history admit girls as full members of the school in two new purpose-built boarding houses. It seemed a change as seismic as the Epsom Derby becoming a jump race.
Nick Ferguson has a refreshingly honest summary of at least one of the reasons why the decision was made:‘ I think it will change the character of the school, but probably for the better. One of the things I’ ve learned from young OWs, people who are fairly fresh out of university, is that they say they didn’ t know much about women: it is a problem to emerge at 18 knowing very little about the other sex.’
Steady on. In my time in the school there were some girls in the sixth form— two I think, as the daughters of dons. The question had been asked at that time, when James Sabben-Clare was Headmaster, whether to make the kind of expansion now planned, but the proposal was ultimately shelved. This time around the Governing Body carefully disposed with some arguments against making a change: that it would damage choice in a shrinking pool of boys’ private schools, that you would be fundamentally changing the character of the school, and that you’ d be‘ messing around with 600 years of history’. On the last point, Nick is very clear where he ended up:‘ I came to the conclusion personally that no, the 600 years didn’ t matter, that wasn’ t the issue; and you have to look forward not backwards.’
He also feels the admission of girls in V� th Book will increase standards in a school which unashamedly wants to select on the basis of ability.
‘ If we’ d just taken in 100 more young boys, we would have been taking in the ones we currently turn down, so … we will up the quality … and that seemed to me essential for a school where quality is so important.’
And on the question of how the character of Winchester College would change, or as the plan puts it, the‘ look and feel’, he sees a number of likely changes, from greater variety in choirs and music to important changes in the teaching of Div, a matter close to the heart of all Wykehamists. Certainly when you speak to any OW, you get a torrent of memories of eclectic div subjects being taught by eccentrics, often with a passion that lingers in the memory decades later. I remember a heated debate at my time in the school, that there was too much
At home in Kilfinan
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