Taylorian

TAYLORIAN 2024

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St Barnabas’ Day Speech 2024 R ichard 0ulcaster was our first Head Master. When the Court of Merchant Taylors’ Company set up

had some wonderful phrases to describe a good school. Schools are: ‘treasuries of learning… storehouses of humanity…the sources of knowledge and wisdom’. Mulcaster’s vision for education at MTS was clear: ‘Nature to lead it, reason to back it, custom to commend it and experience to approve it.’ He was an innovator and would have approved of an exciting change in our admissions process. This year we shifted from dual entry points at 13+ and 11+ to a single entry at 11. This has been met with approval from applicants – it offers earlier access to our teachers and facilities, and also allows us to design a curriculum and pastoral care that seamlessly carries the pupils from Year 7 through to university entry. In this speech you will hear that we offer so much to our pupils, and they in turn enrich the experience of school. All this was anticipated by Mulcaster, who wrote that a school should offer ‘Excellence fashioned for another’. This would make it ‘The choice of promising scholars’. Education is demanding: ‘Scholars cannot rest satisfied with little’. He would be pleased to learn that they are still dissatisfied with settling for little.

our school in 1561, it gave some interesting instructions to Mulcaster in the school’s statutes. He was told that he was to teach the children not only good literature, but also good manners. However, pupils might object to the next instruction: “Let not the scholars to have leave to play except only once a week. Nor let the scholars use no cocN fighting tennis play nor riding about or disputing abroad, which is but foolish babbling and loss of time.” Very strict. Despite his appointment, Mulcaster was not always happy in his relations with the Company. On 26th November 1574, Merchant Taylors’ Court told him off for his ‘injurious and quarrellinge speache’ when they visited on the previous St Barnabas’ Day. I hope to do better in this speech, exactly 450 years later. Mulcaster was a well-known figure. Shakespeare may have been making fun of him in Love’s Labour’s Lost , with Holofernes the schoolmaster. We know that Mulcaster had pupils of Merchant Taylors’ perform at least three plays to Queen Elizabeth, to teach them “good behaviour and audacity.” There was great rivalry

St Barnabas’ Day between Shakespeare and the boy actors, and when he has Holofernes say, ‘I protest the schoolmaster is exceeding fantastical; too too vain, too too vain,’ Shakespeare uses a common expression of Mulcaster’s. Perhaps Shakespeare was making fun of his theatrical rival at court. In 1581, Mulcaster wrote a book on what a good education should be, which proposed a radical vision of schooling that still inspires today. I would like to use his own words, taken from the book we hold in our archive, to guide my description of the year’s achievements. In his book, Mulcaster Last summer, at A Level, 70% of results were A* or A. At GCSE, we had 86% A* or A grades, 68% of which were A*s, which was a new high for examined outcomes. This intellectual stretch and challenge is also true in terms of university applications. This year, the school had 11 Oxbridge offers; 9 students won places at Medical School. Every year, the vast majority go on to elite universities. I would like to capture some further vignettes of scholarship and excellence – albeit an imperfect and partial list. As ever, pupils won multiple Senior and Intermediate Olympiad Golds across