Name: Henry
Secondary school: Ampleforth College
University Destination + subject studied: Oxford Classics
Everyone in our year gathering on the quad, all meeting each other for the first time, and the excitement of it all.
Performing Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof and receiving a standing ovation.
The pastoral care at the time could and should have been better. I do acknowledge, however, that we all did not have the same awareness of these issues as we do now.
My prep school were very diligent in preparing us for the entrance exam, and as a scholarship candidate, they also put on extra evening classes for us.
The academic support was excellent. They were very attentive to my progress and I had every opportunity to push my learning forward beyond the curriculum as much as I wanted to.
Yes, Roman Catholic.
Achieving a Diploma in Music performance on the tuba. It was the first time I had to work with focus and consistency over a long period of time, and it was the first goal I had set for myself without any external guidance or direction.
For those that were considered capable of gaining entrance, there was a great enthusiasm and support network.
Yes, I am still in regular contact with my old teachers and some of the monks. I hold them very dear and consider myself to have been an enormous beneficiary of there care.
I had a detention every Friday and every weekend for my final year! I had some differences of opinion with my teachers about how I wanted to focus my learning on the last year, spending more time pushing my musical practice. We never fell out though, I just got a lot of detentions!
When I was a student there was one school counsellor, though he was normally called in when kids were caught smoking. The school was run by monks and they provided a pastoral care in their own fashion. I know now that the pastoral elements have greatly been developed, though I do not know the details.
Eccentric, spiritual, open