Fr Banyard, Reverend Fathers, Reverend Brother, Ladies and Gentlemen, pupils of St Aloysius’ College, it is with great pleasure that I address you today at our annual Prize Giving.
As is traditional on this occasion , I will begin by reviewing the past academic year.
There were in the course of 2006/07 some very important changes at the College.
From the point of view of pupils and examinations, the return to a full diet of S4 public exams was completed at the end of last year. Most S4 pupils sat eight Intermediate 2s and a GCSE in Religious Studies. We were delighted with the results that they achieved.
In S6, we moved away from A Level to the Scottish qualification of Advanced Higher and, as I have already acknowledged in my letter home to parents, we were anxious about this move. Advanced Higher is a challenging course and is highly regarded by universities because of its emphasis on independent study. As with Intermediate 2, the Advanced Higher results were good, and for both S4 and S6 I am confident that these curriculum changes will benefit our students as learners and help them to develop the necessary skills to study at school and university.
Whilst there were no changes to the Higher programme and we were very pleased with the pass rate achieved by S5, we do have some concerns about the number of A grades achieved.

From a staffing point of view there were also some significant changes.
In the Junior School there is a new management and leadership structure and Dr Brady has been appointed Head of the whole Junior School, a post that has not existed for some years.
In the Senior School the retirement of Mr Divers from his role as Assistant Head was, without wishing to make him sound older than he is, an historic event. I paid tribute to Mr Divers in my letter to parents at the end of last term and thanked him for his 38 years of service to the College and on your behalf I do so again this afternoon.
Last year saw further appointments of Heads of Department as we continue to return to a departmental structure and away from faculties. This move had the full support of staff when it was discussed some two years ago and I have no doubt that the change will benefit teaching and learning.

2006/07 saw the introduction of a Parents’ Consultative Council. Meeting four times a year I have found it an invaluable sounding board for parents’ views and opinions on possible changes and a means of parents raising general concerns and issues.

During the year the staff, the parents’ council and the senior school pupil council were consulted about a series of possible options for development and improvement. As a result of those consultations a clear message emerged that, if we had resources available, we should address, in the following order, additional support for learning, the widening of curriculum options in the Senior School, the reduction of class size and investment in ICT as a means of assisting learning. I am pleased to report that we were able to devote additional resources to all four areas and, in particular, to additional support for learning and the reduction of class size.

In a Jesuit School we appreciate that God can be found in all things and that, therefore, there is really no such thing as a secular curriculum such as Maths, English and Science. That said, Christian Formation is a hugely important part of the work of the school and to emphasise this I would like to quote some figures that Fr Bishop presented to our Governors about the numbers who took part in retreats last year. In the Senior School, some 756 pupils were involved, almost 90% of the pupil population, including almost the whole of S5 who made use of the wonderful opportunity that a Kairos retreat provides. This retreat work is in addition to involvement in the liturgy, the new and rapidly expanding community service programme for S6 and S5, a programme that has become an example of good practice for other schools, and charitable work that includes the Lourdes Pilgrimage and the Children’s Fund Holiday, works that are made possible through the wonderful generosity of the parents of the College.

I hope that my brief and selective review has painted a picture of a developing and vibrant school. The academic year 2007/08, the 149th in the history of the College, began with 1312 pupils on roll, with a large S6, seven classes in S1, three classes in each of P4, 5 and 6, and four classes in P7. Believe me, that is more than enough to keep all of us on the staff very busy.

Last year, in my prize giving address, I spoke about the lives of St Ignatius Loyola, St Francis Xavier and Blessed PeterFaber. In a year of Jesuit anniversaries it seemed appropriate to reflect on their lives and their enduring impact on educational work. This year I would like to focus on creativity as a hallmark of Jesuit education.

In my review of the year I highlighted changes in our examination structure in S4 and S6. I did so because exams are important in themselves as measures of achievement, self-discipline and personal growth and because they are the platform from which our pupils will enter the competitive anddemanding world of higher education and employment.

I am concerned, however, that the highly constrained and restrictive curriculum and examination diet which pupils are subjected to has a detrimental effect on their ability to be creative and inhibits us, their teachers. It has been proved repeatedly in educational research that children learn best when they are engaged and excited by what they studying, when teachers have the opportunity to be creative, even inspirational. As parents I am sure that you recognize thetruth of this.

I would go further and argue that for pupils or students to be good at any subject they have to be creative themselves. History is more than just learning dates, Chemistry is more than equations and formulas, and English is more than technical language. The greatest historians and the greatest scientists are good at handling a mass of information but their greatest comes from seeing the evidence in a different way and putting forward new, creative suggestions and ideas. The greatest sportsmen and women see the game in a different way; they have skill and, above all, the imagination to be creative and to do something the opposition were not expecting.

Unfortunately, examinations, Highers in particular, do not encourage creative thinking. They place great emphasis on factual recall. Whilst this is obviously an important skill, it is good to be able to learn things by heart, and pupils must be well drilled and well prepared for examinations, it disappoints me, as a teacher, that there is so little opportunity to do something different, to have some fun and be creative. Instead we have NABs, term exams, unit tests, the collection of good evidence for appeals and so on, and we need it all, because the current system demands it, children need to go to university and have access to a good career.

My belief is, that as a nation, we damage our prospects, our future through ignoring creativity and over- valuing rote learning. We are poorer, both financially and spiritually, for our neglect of creative thinking.

Twenty years ago I doubt whether Microsoft, Google, Easyjet, or Virgin would be names that many of us would have been particularly familiar with. Each of these successful companies was the brainchild and product of creative individuals. They continue to be successful because of the creativity of their leaders and their staff.
How then can we encourage our young people to be creative and flexible thinkers? I would suggest that if you want to encourage creativity, then the study of the arts is one place to start.

The arts encourage a different way of thinking, one that is not based on right or wrong answers, that does not require factual recall but invites us to look, listen, feel, reflect and respond. Through the arts we learn that there is more than one way of doing something.

Good artists do not stand still and just reproduce what has gone before, even if it was popular and successful. They learn from others, they take risks, they try different ways of working, they are creative. In the same way a business that stands still goes bust and science that stands still becomes irrelevant.

If we want to teach our young people to be creative, to be entrepreneurial, to be really successful in their chosen profession, it seems to me that we should look for ways of encouraging original thought and ideas, and of providing opportunities for self-expression and argument.

Though art needs no justification, and usefulness should never be the criterion on which it is judged, there is another reason for studying the arts, one that is ultimately more important than securing a successful career. The arts tell us something of what it is to be human. Those who are “commonly accepted as ‘great’ artists – Shakespeare, Mozart, Michelangelo etc. – are only great because they express and represent human feelings in the most forceful and effective way” (John Wilson). Great artists affect the way we feel and think, and great art helps to make us better human beings.

The belief that the arts help us to be better human beings is one that is deeply Catholic. We know that our world has been made holy by God, that we and it are good, and are destined or called to be with God in heaven. To use a well known theological phrase, we believe that “grace perfects nature” (Aquinas).
St Ignatius Loyola was determined to use any means in his power to “help souls”. He wanted to engage the whole person, body, mind and spirit. The early Jesuit school teachers sought to do this through music, art, drama and dance, with dance often being used by pupils in Church in the 16th century. In reading about the first Jesuit school in Messina in Sicily it would appear that the Jesuits may even have invented rap music as a means of helping their pupils learn and remember. From its earliest days the Society of Jesus has been engaged in the arts and been in the forefront of scientific and mathematical research. One of the great Jesuit scientists was Christoph Clavius. There were great Jesuit musicians, artists and architects. Arguably one of the greatest poets of the English language was a British Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Over the centuries The Society of Jesus has been part of a great Christian humanist tradition whose origins go back, long before Jesus, to ancient Greece and Rome. Ignatius was greatly influenced by the Roman orator and writer Cicero. A line from Cicero was frequently quoted in early Jesuit schools. Its expression and sentiment should be recognised easily by any pupil of the College. “We are not born for ourselves alone” (Non nobis solum nati sumus, De officiis 1.7.22).

My argument has been that more creativity in education and in our curriculum will benefit our teaching and above all the learning of our pupils. That it will, if assisted by a study of the arts, help us to be better human beings and more successful in our chosen career. That success must however call us, in the words of St Ignatius, to “initiate great undertakings in the service of God our Lord and persevere in them with constancy when it is called for” Constitutions n728.

May God bless us all in our enterprise.

I would like to invite Fr Banyard to present the prizes.