Wellington College wins TES Independent School Award

On Friday evening at the TES Independent School Awards, Wellington College picked up the award for ‘Best Independent–Maintained School Collaboration’...

For three years boys from the Stanley (and more recently girls from the Orange) have been working with children with learning difficulties from Carwarden House School in Frimley, Surrey.

The vision at the start of this project was for students (year 11 and some older year 13 leaders) in one house to get personally engaged with a community service project so that it really meant something to them and was ‘authentic’. A conversation between Ed Venables, HM of the Stanley, and Tim Novis, Wellington’s chaplain whose daughter attends Carwarden House, resulted in the partnership which has evolved into more of a friendship between the two schools.

The structure of the project has been weekly visits to both schools throughout the school year. The students are largely left to their own devices with leadership from the year 13 students. The emphasis is on the students getting to know one another and simply having fun as teenagers together while working on simple projects. Each year, however, we have worked towards an end goal; a play, a music video and, this year, a dance. The emphasis has been very much on working together rather than the actual quality of the output!

This has provided Carwarden students with an opportunity to increase their independence and to become more confident. This is critical as they prepare to enter a mainstream sixth form college or the workplace. Given the huge rates of unemployment among autistic adults this is highly relevant to the broader economy. The impact on Wellington students has been almost more significant. All social intra-Wellington pressures are forgotten and for the time they are together there is a total calm focus on the other teenagers. Indeed they talk about the time spent as being ‘relaxing’ and a ‘wonderful break’. The students in the Stanley raise money for the charity Autistica too and have learnt much about autism and learning difficulties from Maria Ramsay at Carwarden and from a lecture by Autistica.

What makes this special is that children with anything more than mild learning difficulties are simply not a section of society that the majority of Wellington students (or even mainstream students generally) will ever encounter. The students spoke of a ‘fear’ beforehand and ‘not knowing how to talk to them’. They ended the project each year having built real empathy towards them, fully appreciating their skills and having made friends. This will last for life. They will walk towards people in future (and hopefully employ them) rather than ignore them – we are convinced of this.

For full award winners from the night, click here.

For more information about Wellington College, please visit their page on School Search.