Warden's Report | Wykeham Journal

Wykeham Journal2025 edition

Richard Stagg

Over five years ago, the Governing Body laid out a strategy for Winchester College. Our goals were to see the School admit girls in VIth Book, grow to 900 pupils over a period of 6 - 8 years, and increase access via a growing bursary programme.

We wished to achieve these goals while maintaining, and even enhancing, the quality of our academic and extra-curricular provision.

Despite frustrating delays to the construction of the new Sports Centre, we are broadly on track to achieve the goals we outlined in 2021. The last five years now look, with hindsight, to have been a period of relative predictability and certainty. What lies ahead for independent education is far less clear. The challenge of affordability for many parents was severe, even before recent changes to government policy (VAT, business rates,
and National Insurance). These have put additional pressure on the finances of independent schools and this, in turn, has led to a significant number of school closures.

The three striking features of the response to these challenges from the independent sector are large, for-profit school groups; consolidation (with stand-alone schools looking increasingly unusual); and a sharp rise in the number of overseas campuses run
(to a greater or lesser extent) by UK schools.

Winchester is not immune from these pressures. While the Fellows have no plans to end six-and-a-half centuries of charitable endeavour, we believe that it is our duty as trustees to consider seriously other options to ensure that Winchester continues to flourish in the future. On school consolidation; we merged with The Pilgrims’ School a year ago. This was relatively straightforward as an idea, given our long history of cooperation, our cultural alignment, and our geographical proximity. But it has required considerable time, effort and resource to get the merger working properly – even with so many factors in our favour.

The Warden's Garden, Winchester College — Warden's Garden

We are also determined to retain the character of the school and its values...

Nonetheless, we clearly need to consider whether Winchester should pursue a more ambitious programme of merger and acquisition, as many others are doing. The Governing Body has looked at the options and continues to do so – including the possibility of partnerships which fall short of a full merger. But we have not, so far, seen a compelling case for going further down this route. Being part of a group is, of course, no guarantee of a happy future – as Horris Hill, which closed in July, can sadly confirm. We are also determined to retain the character of the school and its values, which would inevitably become more challenging if we were part of a larger group of schools, each with its own character and identity.

Similar arguments apply to the rush to establish overseas campuses (triggered in many cases by the imposition of VAT on education in the UK). We are well aware that some of our peers have made a great success of developing their international presence. One, for example, generates a net benefit to its bottom line of around £8 million per annum. In the current financial environment, any school would be delighted to do this and gain the opportunities it brings. The Governing Body is not, however, keen to ‘sell’ our name as a quick-fix for the current financial challenges.

Furthermore, our educational model – with its emphasis on non-examined teaching – is unlikely to be particularly attractive to overseas parents legitimately focused on exam results.

In the context of a contracting independent sector and great uncertainty, I believe we are right to be cautious about both mergers and overseas campuses: recent events in the Middle East illustrate the difficulty of predicting the future. Instead, we are focused on making the most of our strengths: outstanding teaching, top-class music and sport, and excellent pastoral provision based on boarding and the houses as homes from home. We believe our approach to education, with its emphasis on non-examined learning and on developing analytical and cognitive skills, is becoming ever-more important in a world dominated by AI (where we are seeing, to quote Iain McGilchrist, ‘the replacement of understanding by information’). The Headmaster’s article makes this point far more eloquently.

The Fellows are therefore determined to preserve Winchester’s unique philosophy of education, based on a belief in intellectual freedom, academic rigour, and the importance of pupils challenging orthodoxies and making up their own minds on the basis of evidence. This is not only right in a philosophical sense, but it is also more likely to lead our pupils on to productive and worthwhile lives than merely learning to absorb information and reproduce it. In a nutshell, we are always ready to adapt when needed (as I think the last five years demonstrate), but we will not be tempted by short-term palliatives which are contrary to our values and our ethos.

Winchester College Treasury — Treasury, opened in 2016

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