The Chronicle 2022

case in the past gives us greater depth, but it also requires more classrooms and other facilities and so attention has been given to building four new classrooms during the course of this year, along with an Academic Innovation Hub which is a donation from one of our illustrious Old Boys, Divesh Makan, who has lit up the Silicon Valley. It is also entirely necessary to update boarding facilities, especially if you are a full boarding school, every four decades or so and, to this end the strategy is to build a new Tatham on the south side of the Pennington Quad beginning in 2023 and to decant boys from Founders, East, West, Farfield and Pascoe through the current Tatham while their Houses are being remodelled and brought up to meet the expectations of parents in the 2020s. On the academic front, there is always discussion as to how we measure success: percentage of passes, percentage of Bachelor’s Degree entry passes, number of A symbols per boy or overall average per subject. In all of these our boys excelled in last year’s IEB matriculation examinations. One hundred percent of our boys passed and 100% achieved a Bachelor Degree entry pass – a full house in the latter for the first time. There were 3.1 A symbols per boy and the subject average across all boys across all subjects was 75%. Forty one achieved A aggregates out of a cohort of 110. In Mathematics 52.9% of the boys achieved distinctions. Mathematics continues to be one of the flagships of Michaelhouse. Relative to competitive schools at all levels we did exceptionally well and we have cause to be proud of our academic standing. In terms of our staffing, the recent past has seen the retirement of a number of key senior staff such as Paul Fleischack, whose contribution to Michaelhouse has been inestimable; promotions to Headships for others such as Alan Adlington Corfield, Allan Laing and William Silk and some emigration. This has led to the appointment of a number of younger staff who have joined us and who are already making a vigorous impact in a number of areas. In the leadership team, Sibs Ncamani has done well in his role as Deputy Rector: Pastoral in which his specific focus is on the well-being of all the boys in the school. He is an extremely dedicated schoolmaster with a real ability to get close to the action of the boys and to engage with real life situations and he is steadily making his mark. We have also appointed Brendan Gittins, currently Deputy Head at Jeppe High School for Boys, as Deputy Rector: Pupils to work alongside Sibs Ncamani. Brendan Gittins is a talented schoolmaster, aged 35, and with a range of strengths. He will oversee the organisational aspects of the school as well as the discipline and have a light touch consideration of co-curricular matters. He will only be able to start at the beginning of the third quarter and, in the meantime, Dean Forword is acting as Deputy Rector: Pupils and straddling his Housemastership of Founders along with Herman Visagie. We have, I believe, a happy, vibrant and talented staff who make a terrific contribution to the lives of our boys. One area in which we have advanced significantly over the past few years has been in the co-curricular area. In the first quarter of 2019 we won 44% of our matches and, in the first quarter

of this year, 64% of our matches were won. Water polo and basketball, as well as cricket, have shown very good results and the strength and conditioning programme which started in 2018 is beginning to bear fruit. We have been competitive in rugby across all teams and all levels over the past two years and, even if we lost the first XV match to a very powerful Hilton side last Saturday, we won more matches than we lost. We do not have the stars that other schools may have at first team level, but we have a cohesive and gutsy unit and are building strength from the bottom. In an address of ten minutes I am not going to cover every aspect of the school in depth, but I do wish to comment on three further areas: the first of these relates to Transformation and the importance which is attached to this. In our Transformation and Diversity Advisory Committee, boys and staff meet under the Chairmanship of Sibs Ncamani to discuss issues which may be troubling them and notions of greater inclusivity, and the Head Prefect reports back after the twice-termly meetings to the school. Michaelhouse is a school in which all individuals can flourish, regardless of their socio-economic backgrounds and we are moving as rapidly as we can to try to introduce to Michaelhouse more boys from communities which would never have considered Michaelhouse a possible option. We have moved away from calling such boys scholarship boys as there was, ironically, a pejorative aspect to this term and they are now called FABS boys: financially assisted boys. Their progress through Michaelhouse and beyond is important to us. The next thing I would like to comment on is the notion of safeguarding. As you will know, there have been safeguarding issues in a number of schools and we are being proactive in preventing potential abuse. Thirdly, I would like to comment on the Chairmanship of our Board of Anthony Hewat who is due to retire from this role with Andrew Schaefer who has been vice chairman, replacing him. Ant has been a tremendously dedicated chairman, always available for discussion and dialogue on the very challenging issues which now confront every school. Schools are much more complex places than they were even five years ago and I think Michaelhouse owes Ant a great debt of gratitude for his vigilant, thoughtful and incisive leadership. Finally, Michaelhouse continues to seek to create significant men, men whose values underpin their actions, men who make a difference in the world and this is a constant message to our boys. A concurrent message is that what is important in their overall development is their spirituality, the development of the inner person they are becoming and the role which they are called upon to play in the lives of their peers and in serving others. The message to the boys, in line with the intentions of James Cameron Todd, is that they are more than flesh and blood and bones: they have another dimension to them that is unseen and that is of real significance. We want them, in time, to make a difference in the world.

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