Meet our head of Prep School: Andrew Willis

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Offering the highest quality teaching

Andrew joins us after more than 20 years of teaching on the Channel Island of Jersey. He was appointed to his first headship in 2006. In 2012, he transferred to Samarès School with a mission to raise aspirations and standards of achievement in addition to building a strong community that gave effective support to families. As a result of this work, he was recognised with the 2016 Inspirational Leader of the Year Award. First and foremost, our vision is to ensure that every Prep School pupil is given access to the very highest quality teaching. I have three principal guidelines which inform every element of my leadership of a school: we should all work hard, enjoy what we’re doing and we should be kind. I think that if all of us – pupil and teacher alike – are working as hard as we can while making learning as creative and engaging as possible, we will all make great progress in the coming years. Equally importantly, Wellington has a tangibly strong sense of community and in any community, kindness and consideration for one another is essential. So if we can all adhere to those three guidelines then I think we’ll achieve even greater success. Instilling the Wellington values in creative ways Of course, this approach naturally overlaps with the objective of instilling the Wellington values, which we aim to do even more effectively this year and beyond. In order to do that, we are working together with pupils and parents to get a stronger understanding of each of the five values of courage, responsibility, respect, integrity and kindness. We’re asking questions such as: “How do you show courage in a maths lesson?” or, “What does it mean to have integrity inside and outside of school?” Essentially, we aim to ensure that the Prep School pupils have a very firm grasp of exactly what the Wellington Values mean and how they should be exhibited in their daily lives. Fortunately, we’re building on a very strong curriculum and set of values that are already in place. So far I have seen a lot of very well-equipped learners. Moving onwards and upwards from here, we need to be as creative as we can in our learning. That doesn’t just mean adding art and design elements into our teaching, for example, it means really infusing all subjects with truly engaging and creative elements, so that pupils will achieve a much deeper understanding of them. I’m looking forward to working together with the pupils and their teachers to come up with creative approaches in all subjects; that’s going to be one of our most important focuses for the coming year. Strengthening clear and effective mutual communication between the school and the parents Maintaining and strengthening that triangular relationship between the school, its pupils and parents is absolutely key, and it’s something I’m personally very invested in making as meaningful as possible for everyone involved. To achieve that, we need very clear and effective communication going both ways. We need to be giving out accurate and useful information to parents and pupils, while they in turn must be able to feel like they have the opportunity to express their views and share their ideas. By having those meaningful conversations, by sharing and using those ideas, we can all work together to strengthen both our school and our community. What I’ve seen so far is that the teachers here go out of their way to engage parents and build personal relationships with them, and that’s something I’m very much looking forward to doing myself. By meeting parents in both formal and informal situations, having one-on-one conversations and building relationships, we can create the kind of clear and effective communication that I’m talking about. Andrew Willis Head of Prep School