A Sustainable Society | Wykeham Journal

Equipped with a place and a 75% bursary, Oscar seized the chances to satisfy his inquiring and enterprising mind. He found Winchester’s approach an engine of opportunity. Dons, he quickly realised, encouraged discussion well beyond the curriculum. ‘They are used to pupils who want to involve themselves further in a subject, beyond the bits they get to teach you.

They might say “I can’t cover this topic, but you could go and build a little (computer) programme to look at it”.’ He would recommend Winchester, but only to those prepared to respond to what the school offers. ‘It’s not a place for people who want everything laid out for them,’ he says. ‘There are loads of opportunities to take things further. But they’re not always laid out on a platter; you have to do the work.’

£40M

will have been spent in bursary support since 2005 by the end of the year

And he did. On his way to achieving four A* grades in his A-levels, and one more A* for his Extended Project Qualification (EPQ), Oscar was co-president of the Sustainability Society and founded the Go Society; sat the Grade 8 guitar exam; took part in a community service rewilding project; was co-president of Equality Society; wrote a blog on climate (www.climatesoup.co.uk); practised aikido and karate and campaigned against the planned extraction of oil in Hampshire. What he calls on his website his ‘smaller projects’ include things like ‘live boids simulation made with godot’ and a ‘MENACE-style hexapawn algorithm’. MENACE, in case you’re wondering, stands for Matchbox Educable Noughts and Crosses Engine.

Equipped with a place and a 75% bursary, Oscar
seized the chances to satisfy his inquiring and enterprising mind. He found Winchester’s approach an engine of opportunity.

This was Oscar’s description of his EPQ project on ‘emergence’: ‘To begin to understand these emergent behaviours, I built computer models of their behaviour: I modelled birds flocking and reaction diffusion and an ant colony, and then applied that system as an heuristic for the “travelling salesman problem”.’ He is now studying Computing at Imperial College in London.

The ancient board game of Go illustrates emergence: the rules are simple but its strategy and tactics gradually emerge as highly complex. Oscar became a passionate player. ‘Go has taught me to choose my battles, to concentrate play to the right effect.’ All this activity has a purpose: to be a change-maker, and in particular on the climate crisis. Winchester’s then Head of Geography, Dr Alex Clayton, told the Sustainability Society that advisers to the Warden and Fellows were starting a study on the school diet and its environmental impact. Various scientific bodies had issued recommendations on changing school diets which, at scale, will have a significant potential impact on the consumption of energy and resources across Britain. Winchester did not score highly against those benchmarks. Dr Clayton invited members of the society to help with the study. Oscar wrote three sections; he and two fellow students eventually made presentations to the Environmental Sustainability Advisory Group (ESAG) of experts which helps
the Governing Body.

72.00

%

was the average bursary award per pupil (2023)

19.00

bursaries were awarded to state school applicants in 2018/19

29.00

bursaries were awarded to state school applicants in 2022/23

That analysis helped start the school’s move away from meat. As Oscar’s Climate Soup blog recorded in March 2023: ‘Some Houses are already eating less meat. Most notably, Hopper’s had 20-25 pupils go vegetarian for a week (and the vast majority stuck with it!). Two Houses are implementing plans to have two house-wide vegetarian meals per week (one lunch, one tea) based on what current vegetarian pupils enjoy most and on the trial in Hopper’s. As I was writing this, I heard that Kenny’s has also got 25 people signed up for a week of vegetarian meals! College is going ahead with the trial as well, and staff have been asked to join in when they eat at College lunches. It is great to see pupil-led actions like this, which can, where Matrons and Housemasters are on board, make a real change. Oscar thinks that the school could do better in making people more aware of initiatives in sustainability.

The school has contributed to the training of a potential leader belonging to an environmentally-aware and understandably impatient younger generation.

Man walking outside of Imperial College London

Needless to say, Oscar wants to have ‘that kind of impact’ somewhere in the issue of climate change. The school has contributed to the training of a potential leader belonging to an environmentally-aware and understandably impatient younger generation. Winchester’s role has been to equip him to think for himself and to develop his independent curiosity. Coming to Winchester, he says, was ‘life-changing’. I can easily imagine that we may one day hear of Oscar making the impact of which he dreams.

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