Posted 06/11/2019

Next Tuesday, 12th November, we are holding our Sixth Form Open Evening: our opportunity to explain to current Fulham Boys and external students alike what FBS offers and delivers for their critical, final years of school. We’ll be explaining how we are drawing on the best practice and ideas from the state and private sector to prepare our students for A levels, and to equip them for what follows in university life and the world of work.  What are we offering? FBS is an academic sixth form. This means traditional A Level subjects and the EPQ (to some boys) along with BTEC Sport. We have small class sizes and a high number of teaching hours per subject.  We want our teaching to provide a route to the top universities in the country, so two of our sixth form tutors are spending time at Pembroke College, Oxford and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge learning how to fully prepare our boys for Oxbridge.  Students visit the colleges, look at the departments that they are interested in and spend time with undergraduates. We are also building strong links with Brasenose College, Oxford and Trinity College Oxford, through partnerships centred on rowing but again giving our boys the opportunity to experience university life and lose inhibitions about applying to these big beasts. 

Posted 29/09/2019

The Starting Gun It was the day after I had run the London Marathon in 2017 and the last thing I wanted in the world was an after-school staff meeting. To exacerbate matters it was held in a classroom where the only seating option was a stool (at the time it was in transition from an Art room to a Drama room on its way to becoming a Maths classroom now that it isn’t a Science lab anymore) so my legs were particularly unhappy to be present at the meeting and not in an ice bath. On the agenda was setting and in particular whether we should move towards mixed ability classes. High on acid (lactic) I was unusually happy to sit back and listen to the various perspectives. The mathematicians were acutely angry, the scientists were studiously skeptical, the geographers were earth-shatteringly eager. I had done limited research, and keenly aware that you could make research say whatever you wanted to anyway, voted with my blistered feet. Let’s go mixed ability in English and think about it in September once my calf muscles stop throbbing.