I am indebted to my brother Hugh, fellow Principal at Claires Court for the following post on our Dad, who died on Friday 27 November 2015.

David Wilding, who has died aged 89, was, together with his first wife, Josephine, founder of Claires Court School in Maidenhead, Berkshire. Born at the family home in Ealing on 15 March 1926, he was immensely proud throughout his life that his birthday was also the “Ides of March”, the day that Julius Caesar was assassinated. He was the younger son of Hugh Munro Wilding and Hilda Mary (née Cantopher). While his father was a company secretary and his grandfather a surgeon in general practice, the particular branch of the Wildings included former headmasters of the grammar schools at High Ercall, Shropshire and Evesham, Worcestershire, and notably James Wilding, headmaster and proprietor of Cheam School from 1805 to 1826. Of greater interest to the pupils he taught later, a second cousin was Michael Wilding, the film star and second husband of Elizabeth Taylor.

Following the footsteps of his older brother, Patrick, David was educated at Ealing Priory School which he entered in September 1934. Aged only 17, he went up to King’s College, London (KCL) in 1943 to read History. Shortly after his “call­up” in March 1944, he learnt that Patrick had been killed in action near Perugia in Italy while serving with the Rifle Brigade. After officer training at Sandhurst and with the Life Guards, David was commissioned into 3rd Royal Tank Regiment (3 RTR). In early 1946, he joined 3 RTR in Germany (which had reached Flensburg near the border with Denmark at the time of the German surrender) commanding a troop of 4 Sherman DDs. A keen cricketer of some ability, he was soon playing for “The Ironsides”, a composite side drawn from the four Royal Tank Regiments then stationed in Germany. In January 1948, he resumed his studies at KCL where he was taught by another recently returned from war service, Michael (later Sir Michael) Howard (founder of the Department of War studies at KCL and later Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University). It was during this time at KCL that David met another History student, Josephine Mary Thurley, whom he married in August 1950 after graduating BA with honours.

After a year working in London’s East End as a salesman for Powers­Samas, a British manufacturer of accounting and tabulating machines, David was encouraged to return to his old school (renamed St Benedict’s in 1948) as a teacher in the Middle School, eventually becoming its effective deputy headmaster. During the war years, David had experienced problems with his night vision and in 1954 these were diagnosed as the inherited, degenerative eye disease, Retinitis Pigmentosa. The prognosis of 12 years of sight before blindness was to be one of the spurs that led him to consider starting his own school; another was that the headship positions at St Benedict’s were at the time reserved for monks of the associated Abbey.

On 19 September 1960, he and Josephine opened the doors of Claires Court Preparatory School for Boys to the first 19 pupils (of whom two were their own sons); the 20th pupil joined at the beginning of October. Their venture quickly established itself, offering a day and boarding education based on Roman Catholic values and preparing boys aged from 61⁄2 to 13 years for their senior schools. The roll rose to 54 by the end of the first academic year and to 84 at the beginning of the second. Further expansion took numbers to 160 by 1965 and 185 by 1970. As boarding numbers increased so extra capacity was added but the real growth was in day pupils as the Thames Valley boomed between 1960 and 1980 and Maidenhead’s population burgeoned.

In order to secure further acceptance by becoming a member of one of the associations of independent schools’ heads, it was necessary for the school to be “recognised as efficient” by the Secretary of State for Education. Inspection by HMI to establish this took place in February 1964 when the Reporting Inspector observed that “The school has made a good start and promises to develop well” and described David as “[conducting] the school with energy and insight and is himself a very able teacher.” The all­important formal “recognition” from Whitehall followed, at the first time of asking, in June 1964 and David, as Headmaster, was duly elected to membership of the Incorporated Association of Preparatory Schools (IAPS).

In the 1970s, the Wildings took the decision to discontinue boarding and the main boarding house, Ridgeway, was converted to accommodate the younger age range of boys. This freed space at the Ray Mill Road East site to allow the introduction of a Senior Department in 1976 and a curriculum leading to GCE O­level at age 16. Pupil numbers continued to rise, from 280 in 1980 to 435 ten years later. In 1985, David and Josephine extended their partnership to include their two sons, Hugh and James. Following Josephine’s death in 1988, David stepped back from day­to­day duties in 1989 and retired to Norfolk, withdrawing from partnership with his sons in 1996.

Although registered blind in the 1970s, the removal of cataracts restored some useable vision and in 1984 he answered an appeal by Berkshire Blind Society and the Lions’ Club of Maidenhead for volunteers to help establish a talking edition of the Maidenhead Advertiser based on cassette. As a consequence, he organised editing teams drawn from Claires Court’s teaching staff, the Maidenhead Catenian Circle (of which he was a founding member) and Maidenhead Drama Guild among others and allowed Ridgeway to become the headquarters of the Maidenhead and District Talking Newspaper Association as well as becoming its Chairman for a time.

On retirement in 1989, David moved to Letheringsett, Norfolk with his second wife, June. An inveterate and skilful organiser, in 1996 he and June established Holt Blind Club, a charity under the auspices of the Norwich and Norfolk Blind Association. He also found time to take an interest in the local Probus Club and played frequently in the blind section of Holt Bowls Club. From this distance, David kept a keen interest in the further development of Claires Court, as well as playing host to many friends and wider family whose company was always very welcome to his home in the Glaven valley. In particular, as one who had enjoyed amateur dramatics as a student, he took great delight in organising theatre parties (which had to include his grandchildren) to the Pantomime, wherever it took place! He travelled widely in Europe and Canada and played an active part in the parishes of St Andrew’s, Letheringsett and latterly St Peter’s, Blakeney until his sight failed completely in recent years.

In 1950 he married, first, Josephine Thurley. They had two sons. Josephine died in 1988. He married, secondly, in 1989, June Hoy (née Thompson). June died in 2002. His third wife, Susan Sergeant (née Walmsley formerly Willmott), whom he married in 2004, survives him with his two sons, six grandchildren and a great­ grandson.

David Wilding, born 15 March 1926, died 27 November 2015

“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.” Abraham Lincoln

Since my last blog about the refugee crisis, appalling tragedies in the Lebanon, France and Mali have taken place. Because we hear so often about indiscriminate violence in parts of the middle east and africa, the shock value has been diminished. Not so that of the Paris bombings, not just because of the extraordinary and callous nature of the crimes, but also because of the apparent failure of the various European security forces to react to very good and timely warnings of intelligence.

I returned to work last Monday and set about notifying all in our community by email that we were having to reassess the risks around our various trips and residentials planned for the next few weeks. In consulting with my colleagues in leadership, I had to bear in mind not just what was safe to do given the change in circumstances, but what was morally right as well. As our Prime Minister made clear at the time, to give into to terror is an admission of defeat.

The trouble is of course, that as an individual, I can be brave, and stand shoulder to shoulder with others in our country and community. That’s a legitimate choice I can make, and down to me. It has certainly been more awkward to consider how best to act when the government risk factors get lifted to the highest level, because of course I am authorising decisions that affect others, both adults and children. So in postponing a planned trip to Lille, on the very edge of the man-hunt for one of the missing terrorists from the Paris assaults, whilst it seemed highly unlikely anything would happen, it is quite a comfort subsequently to receive advice from government that travel to France at this stage is unwise.

As the days progress, we find that our day trips to London and elsewhere have resumed safely. It is still much more difficult to manage evening visits, simply because our own community at school is expressing considerable concern and disquiet as well. The consequences, should an incident happen are too terrible to think about; like many other schools and colleges, we have to think not just of our students but of our staff as well, who themselves have their safety and those of their families to consider as well.

Lincoln’s aphorism helps perhaps give a suitable perspective to the problems we face; we have been reintroduced to the notion that life actually has rather too many barbs about it for comfort just at the moment. As time passes and the security forces enable us to feel a greater sense of safety, I am sure our sense of adventure will grow once more. But for the time being, I’ll stay cautious for our adults and children, because I do take my responsibilities to care and safeguard others really seriously.

For most people wherever they are in the world, this is a time of greater uncertainty than usual. For those of us based in the UK, so long as we stay at home, then perhaps the unexpected is largely explainable. But any traveler going abroad now faces a world in which a very good deal is not yet know. I copy alongside an infographic from the Daily Mail reminding pilots of the places they cannot fly over once leaving our shores; lots of red and big bold lines makes the image seem really quite threatening.  It’s quite obvious that pilots and air traffic controllers need to be very alert, not just because there are thousands of planes up there in the airspace, but because there is so much more now to concern them.

The growing threats caused by instability around the world  is bringing severe challenges to learning communities, such as those found in schools, colleges and universities. Rolling out here at Claires Court amongst our staff and for use with our pupils is work wrapped around the ‘Prevent’ strategy, through which we hope we can raise our community’s consciousness and ability to respond to the ideological challenge of terrorism and the threat from those who promote it. I quote further from the government’s own Prevent publication: “In doing so, we must be clear: the ideology of extremism and terrorism is the problem; legitimate religious belief emphatically is not. But we will not work with extremist organisations that oppose our values of universal human rights, equality before the law, democracy and full participation in our society. If organisations do not accept these fundamental values, we will not work with them and we will not fund them”. 

The introduction to this document was written by the Home Secretary, Theresa May MP, our own representative for Maidenhead in the House of Commons. She has a challenging job, made less easy I dare say since she has to manage substantial ongoing change in the Police Force, to take costs out whilst maintaining or indeed enhancing the provision of law and order. I see Police Forces are beginning to deploy drones to assist with law enforcement along with other high performance technologies such as heat seeking and movement detection. Such rapid technology change will require new skills to be acquired, not just a reduction into lowly paid security guard work, and there’s the rub. Are our security forces of the calibre to be trained? Where once we had policemen patrolling our streets, we now have council uniforms with full fluorescent flashes to cover this mundane activity. So long as we are a law abiding society, that’ll work I guess.  But I fear the plans to cut back even more sharply on our public services just now are ill-judged, and here’s why.

Seeing now the settling of very substantial groups of Syrian and other nationality refugees in other European countries, training educational communities to look out for needles in a hay-stack (spotting radicalisation) seems very much off the mark. Austria, Germany and Sweden are preparing local towns for a mass influx of hundreds and thousands, displaced children and lone adults, as well as families or friends, This new population is going to be there into the medium/long term. As one headline this week (again from the Mail on-line) makes clear, “First of 750 migrants arrive in tiny German village with a population of just 102 (including a neo-Nazi councillor) bracing itself for 700 PER CENT population hike”.
Read more here.

In the living memory of the oldest German citizens, these mass migrations they are seeing now are on a similar scale to those that arose at the end of World War 2. Some 2 million Germans for example left Czechoslovakia, and on most borders in the Baltic and the Balkans between 10,000 and 20,000 Germans were being unceremoniously ousted from their adopted homes.  Some 500,000 alone had to leave Yugoslavia. At the same time of course, the departing Germans left homes, land, jobs etc. needing to be filled; the Russians now in occupation of Poland forcibly removed 2 million to the west, whilst moving almost as many Ukrainians and Belorussians eastwards to take up the work available in the USSR. Anyone able to move to the ‘free’ world west of Germany did, some 900,000, and the UK took its fair share.  For example, the ex-pat  polish population local to Maidenhead and Slough grew heavily as a result.  I’ll not extend the History lesson further – feel free to read more on this BBC refugee article; suffice it to say my own father’s post war experiences as a tank commander in Germany included witnessing the mass repatriation movements both west and east.

I take seriously my responsibilities to ensure that our school community learns and understands how to manage the risks we face from unprecedented terrorist threats, and to do our best to prevent radicalisation in the first place. However, because the political damage would be so great, currently I see no leadership from our government or parliament in how we are going to assist the northern hemisphere with the largest forced migration seen this century,  bigger even dare I say than that of the Second World War.

The EU predict some 3 million refugees will be with us in Europe by this time next year, and ‘batten down the hatches and don’t let them in’ simply won’t work as an educational message for the children in our school and in the UK more generally. There are vast numbers of displaced children alone who will need care and accommodation. We have precedent set on our country’s willingness to assist refugee children. In the 9 months prior to the outbreak of the second world war, the UK accepted 10,000 Jewish children from the Nazi regime (Kindertransport), and as events turned out, most were the only members of their family to survive the Holocaust that then swept through the Jewish community during Hitler’s rein of terror. What we as a nation did then brought us much international regard later on. Likewise, largely because of the remarkable 1993 film starring Liam Neeson, Schindler’s List, 7 times Oscar winner, we have learned that brave men and women living in Nazi occupied territories that assisted in the successful evacuation of Polish-Jewish refugees. The film depicts the real life story of Oskar Schindler’s life in Krakow, where as a businessmen he managed to save the lives of 1200 jews, by providing them with work in his ceramics factory.  The close of the film shows Schindler travelling to the West away from the advancing Russians,  hoping to surrender to the Americans. Wikipedia’s entry close on the film says this:

“As a Nazi Party member and war profiteer, Schindler must flee the advancing Red Army to avoid capture. The SS guards have been ordered to kill the Jews, but Schindler persuades them not to so they can “return to their families as men, not murderers.” He bids farewell to his workers and prepares to head west, hoping to surrender to the Americans. The workers give Schindler a signed statement attesting to his role saving Jewish lives, together with a ring engraved with a Talmudic quotation: “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” Schindler is touched but is also deeply ashamed, as he feels he should have done even more”.

I am actually much more challenged by the impending Refugee crisis soon to be with us. No amount of technology, nor the smooth words of politicians will hide from our country the very real challenge it will be asked to face to engage with and support the relocation of its fair share of 3 million refugees. Unless I am very much mistaken, the statistics already show we are relocating some 600,000 a year into the UK, and if in public we don’t accept the refugees, we’ll be having to home those in Europe displaced by that refugee flood nevertheless. It happened before in my parents’ life time, and it’s coming back now. I wonder who will deserve the plaudits this time?

“Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.”

Britain: Hysterical Nation – http://huff.to/1Lv5sFn

Listening to the radio, I heard recently that wisdom is lost to the young because they cannot see. I was somewhat taken aback by this statement, because my regular contact with children at Claires Court provides me with an awful lot of evidence to the contrary. It’s fair to say that children’s experience is driven very much by their family, school, faith and community channels; for example, if they spend their Sunday mornings at Mini Rugby for 7 years, their thinking about the purpose of Sunday is going to be very different from those that go to Morning Service or Shul. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the children here reach out to support and protect others in ways that are typical of the generosity of young minds. However, I do see problems. Firstly, as children enter their adolescent years, their growing desire for independence from the adult ideas that surround them does become noticeable. Separately, there is a paucity of agenda of many adults who lead education who seem to focus solely on the academic outcomes for children, without thinking about the broader skill base learners need to acquire in order to live successful lives as independent adults.

Others speak in similar negative ways – here’s the Dalai Lama’s take on the matter: “Real change is in the heart, but in modern education there is not sufficient talk about compassion,” the Dalai Lama told a conference entitled Educating the Heart held in Vancouver, British Columbia, during his 2015 fall tour of North America. “Through education, through training the mind and using intelligence, we can see the value of compassion and the harmfulness of anger and hatred.”  You can find a much fuller article by Melvin McLeod on the Dalai Lama’s thinking on UK tour here.

I guess I am particularly lucky to work in a family of some 370+ independent schools where the education of the whole child is paramount, where year by year our biannual conferences focus on that common language that brings educators into the profession, to teach, to make a difference, to lead learning for all not just for those that find it easy. As Chair of Professional Development for ISA, I have made it my mission to promote the essence that underlies successful education, to place children at the heart of what we do and support their growth of intellectual and spiritual development using tools honed by evidence and ethics. The latter is important by the way, as we do not permit corporal punishment for example as many of the more successful far eastern education systems still do.

It’s interesting to distinguish what I mean by children at the heart, and what perhaps others pejoratively describe as child-centred theories of education. I am not connected for example to the principle that children need to learn at their own speed, for if that were true, we would not have age-related boundaries for driving, alcohol usage and sex, and we know that intellectual development is only part of the growth in wisdom we see as adolescents mature. Emotional intelligence is important too, as is the ‘fledging process’ that human families take their children through as they seek to leave home and set up home for the first time. The genuine success the English Middle class have in using the University destination for 3 years is really notable; as a country we are much more successful in graduating our own children (as measure in the conversion time to degree award and chronological age of graduation) compared with our counterparts in the USA and Europe.  In short, there is a dynamic balance between pace of education and achievement; many more able children need time too to catch-up before moving on. This is Singapore’s positive gift to the world, ‘do less, and do it better, and don’t move on until that’s so’.

Years ago, one of the great Professors of Education, Tedd Wragg of Exeter University was contracted by Singapore to identify why their students were so good at passing Accountancy part 1 and so bad at passing part 2s. Part 1 was all about adding up the spreadsheet on a business (let’s say a leisure centre, his example),and part 2 was a test of the advice the accountant could give the business based on the evidence the numbers showed. To his audience (ISA Annual conference 1990s) this came as no surprise, experienced as many of us were in educating multiple nationalities in our school. There is something innately British about being a shopkeeper, and our children almost from the very start are taught how to set up and run businesses. Nursery schools around the land have make-believe as part of the children’s play, and this is embedded in the Early years Foundation stage and we should be hugely proud as a nation that we have this as our starting point.  Singapore noted that from an early age their own curriculum was jam packed with content at the expense of skill acquisition, reacted really positively to Professor Wragg’s advice, and we can all reap that benefit of the changes they made for example to their maths programme now.

Back in April of 2010, the Icelandic volcano of Eyjafjallajokull erupted with such ferocity that Europe’s airlines were grounded for 6 days. Claires Court had just returned to work for the summer term and our Boys Reception classes had just started using their new outdoor garden, complete with hundreds of wooden blocks. Within minutes of their occupation, and unrelated to any adult intervention, the boys were building roads across the bark laden floor in an East West location. “What are you doing, chaps?” asked the Head, Jeff Watkins. “Building runways, so the airplanes can land safely” came the reply. This is brilliant anecdotal evidence that children can see challenges the rest of us can’t and respond and learn. We don’t have to proscribe the learning opportunities available, though do need to prescribe that we have breadth, diversity and challenge.

The danger is that external pressures on teachers and school leaders to ensure they perform and deliver against targets becomes the reason why they come to work. The measurement of outcomes at the expense of process is one of the great corrupting features visible in education and we are served very badly if schools are monetised by these principles. The growing permanent exclusion of unwell children from more successful schools for fear their presence damages their educational statistics is well known in England, and as one of the more influential state headteacher think tanks, the Headteachers Round Table make clear, schools need better accountability systems than just counting who gets the best pass rates in national exams.

It’s Fireworks night at Claires Court on Saturday, SL6 4QQ, and we expect as ever a fantastic turnout of our community for our first mass bash of 2015-16. Year 10 and 11 are very much in charge of the extra fundraising stalls, and we have interesting innovations from the STEM club and Young Enterprise to experience. For the first time we have Metcalfe*’s skinny popcorn to run alongside our Children’s film showing and live Rugby World Cup. Yep, I might be OK about children’s empathy for other’s less fortunate, but I am not yet convinced all are completely sound on sweet and sticky.

*www.metcalfesskinny.com