Guy Pearson 2013 - 2020
Guy Pearson 2017 - 2020: Sustainability and Diversity
The new Deputy Head Academic, Stephen Sproule, from Penryn College, taking over from Marcus Bizony, assumed his position along with the other new staff members. By reputation an excellent teacher, he also had displayed a talent for creativity which was the key desired quality.
Following the launch of the 175 Campaign appeal, fundraising continued. One of the first results was the decision by the Trust to re-establish the Hamilton Mvelase Trust. The scholarships that John Peake had set up in the 1980s had been funded by big corporates and embassies, and these scholarships were named the Hamilton Mvelase Scholarship to honour Hamilton, one of the scholars supported in this way, who had been murdered in 1991. After the democratic government took over, the outside funding for these scholarships dried up, and the school’s Scholarship and Bursary fund could not sustain them, and so they were discontinued.
Sustainability as a policy direction was taken up in concerted and organized fashion this year, through the development of a “Future-Fitting policy document”, co-created by a committee of parents, boys, staff, and management, led by Cheryl Douglas and Gerry Noel. This direction had developed from the activities of the Global Initiative Network society, started in 2007. This document was based on the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals accepted by 193 countries in 2015. The school executive then adopted 8 policy directive goals which the committee backcast from 2030 to 2021 to 2018. The first objective was water-usage – to move the campus off-grid. Arising from the GIN initiatives, group of boys calling themselves the Sustainable Agriculture Society, started a vegetable growing project, aimed both at education and food production for the support staff.
Then Sustainability was included as a responsibility in the student leadership portfolios. Initially, Sustainability was focused on environmental issues, but when the executive was asked to adopt the policy, it was agreed that the notion of social sustainability, the concern of the executive leadership, should be added to the policy.
Repairs were undertaken around the Brooke Chapel – damp was damaging the foundations, and the floor was sinking, so the level of the gardens and the paving around the chapel had to be lowered to secure dry foundations. The fruits of the appointment of Sean King as Business Manager in 2013 and the Master Plan drawn up by the Building Committee of Council were increasingly apparent in the level of maintenance and beautification of the campus.
During the year, the usual features on the Bishops calendar were tackled – a Hockey tour to the Netherlands; the Eisteddfod; Classic Pops; Epic, and 32 boys on exchange. Drama as matric subject had been added to the curriculum in 2015, and the 2017 class was the first to write matric exams in Drama.
The Diocesan College Magazine, in the format that had been in place since 1886, had become too expensive to maintain. It had been given to each boy in the school, and to the ODs across the world. Although it was a unique magazine of record, and especially the OD section of the magazine, the Council decided to end the quarterly publication and replace it with an annual magazine. Although the annual magazine looks impressive, it lacks the archive of people and events which so characterized the Diocesan College Magazine. The OD Union decided that they would produce a magazine of their own. Both these magazines were published as digital documents, although hard copies were also available on request.
Guy Pearson returned again in his Prizegiving address to the questions of diversity and social sustainability. He said that the school had started conversations about whether Bishops is a welcoming school regardless of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation, and how the school should respond when it falls short.
Mike Bosman retired as Chairman of Council having served his maximum term of seven years, and Mr Simon Peile succeeded him.
Simon Peile is an OD. He graduated from UCT in 1984 with a Bachelor of Business Science degree, majoring in Actuarial Science and qualified as a Fellow of the Faculty of Actuaries in Edinburgh in 1987. After some years consulting, he joined with his wife Magda in 2003 to form Sygnia, a leading investment management company. He stepped aside from his role in Sygnia in 2017 to follow various initiatives. He has served on the OD Union Committee, is a member of the Bishops Investment Committee and is a trustee of the Bishops Trust.
At the start of 2018, Stephen Sproule decided that administration and school management were not what he wanted to be doing. He resigned and took up a position at St Johns as HOD Maths, in order to return to his first love, classroom teaching. Marcus Bizony helped out in a part-time capacity until Michelle van Schalkwyk from Herschel was appointed as Deputy Head Academic at the start of the third term – the first female to be appointed to the College executive committee.
Following Terry Wilke’s resignation due to ill-health in September of 2017, The Revd Bob Commin filled in as Acting Chaplain for the fourth term of 2017 and all of 2018, and made an immensely powerful impact on the school. Sadly, Terry Wilke died in February 2018, and his funeral, held in the Cathedral was packed. The Archbishop fittingly led the service.
Continuing the Sustainability initiative, the whole school mid-year conference was led by the Cambridge Institute for Leadership Sustainability, which took this process forward in areas of financial, environmental, and social sustainability. This specifically addressed the necessity of making the school society a welcoming and inclusive environment. Addressing the environmental needs, the Business Manager, Sean King, installed a water purification process to the school’s large reservoir, and the College campus became self-sufficient as far as water went. Steps were also taken to address the power supply issues. A pilot project saw photovoltaic cells being installed on the Steffan Coutts-Trotter Indoor Cricket Centre, with the power being fed into a grid-tied system.
The Search committee to appoint the next Principal started its process, and it was intended that the new Principal would be announced during 2019.
The 175 Appeal now led by Samantha Petersen continued, with its focus on buildings, bursaries and building the endowment. As part of the 175 Appeal planning, progress was made on the design of the Prep Library and Learning Centre, and on the Multi-function Centre for the College to replace the Mallett Centre and its surroundings.
The introduction, in the second half of the year, of the ‘Big Ideas’ project, an alternate programme for Grade 9s, was a challenging initiative which sought to address the United Nations Sustainable Development goals dealt with in the Future Fitting policy. In the academic curriculum, all the departments were encouraged to introduce 21st century skills and sustainability targets.
Following on from the Principal’s Prizegiving report in 2017, Warren Wallace led a series of Focus groups to examine questions of diversity and how Bishops could become a more welcoming school. During these meetings, boys were asked to talk about what might make a difference, and what barriers there were that needed to be addressed. Arising from these meetings was the introduction of sustainability portfolios to the matric leadership portfolios to continue the advances made. This also led to an interschools meeting to explore further the questions regarding diversity and belonging and what the situations were in other local schools. The next steps included arriving at a point where mixed Forums could be held. The Bishops Support Unit continued its service to the boys and the staff, perhaps the most significant of these was the improvement in the academic and pastoral support of boys who had been awarded bursaries and whose junior school education was not as privileged.
The school remained a busy place – the World Debating Championships were held at Bishops for a second time – the first being held in 2007. Simply Blue toured to Greece, a Rowing tour to USA had the Bishops rowers competing in the Head of the Charles Regatta, and the staff had some fun by resurrecting one of the features of the Mallett era – a staff play. Appropriately, it was the farce, Noises Off.
The Revd Monwabisi Peter took up his position as Chaplain at the start of 2019. He had previously been at St Andrews Prep. He was inducted by the Archbishop.
Guy Pearson declared in his Introduction to the 2019 Magazine that a major step to make Bishops more relevant to the modern world was to include our Social Sustainability Goals into the Bishops Future-Fitting Policy that was the school’s blueprint for the next decade.
In February, Simon Peile announced the appointment of Tony Reeler as Principal, to take office in July 2020. Tony was Head of Pretoria Boys High, who wanted Tony to stay on there until their replacement Head could assume office. Guy Pearson was willing to continue until June 2020.
Samantha Petersen stepped down as Chair of the Bishops Trust but continued on Council, and Jan Newman took over the reins at the Trust. There was a shift in emphasis from buildings to bursaries.
At the Prep, the Library and Learning Centre was completed and opened. The VUSA academy, which started as a rugby coaching project was now a wide-reaching multi-dimensional collaborative project. The Academy entered rugby teams in the WP Rugby league, there were after-school academic programmes, a creche intervention, and a hot daily meal. Bishops continued to offer financial support as well as assistance in the creche programme; there were interactive days when Bishops boys visited Langa and the Langa boys in turn would visit Bishops.
The newly established Robert Gray Medal was presented to the first recipients, Raymond Ackerman and Robert Frater. The Award, initiated by Council, was established to recognise an OD who had made a significant and exceptional contribution in his field of endeavours, or to society in general.
In 2016, the ODU Chairman, Bruce Jack, following up on the decisions taken at the 2015 strategy session, appointed WP van Zyl as Executive Director (which title was soon changed to Secretary). WP van Zyl had been Senior Prefect in 1997, and he embraced this new position with vigour. He had been very successful promoting the OD Union with the school and among the boys. However, there was clearly a disconnection between him and the committee elected in 2018. Adam Pike, the Chairman of the OD Committee, announced in a terse email in 2019 that the Secretary had resigned. ODs took sides once again, and various efforts to achieve a reconciliation ended with a resolution calling for a Special General Meeting of the Union and the resignation of the committee. At the SGM, attended by over 600 members in person and streamed live, finally it was agreed to withdraw the motion and work with a special subcommittee to resolve the differences. A new Committee was elected at the 2020 AGM. WP van Zyl was elected to the Committee in 2023.
Simon Peile announced at Prizegiving that the objective of not only increasing the diversity within our student body on the basis of race, religion, culture, and sexual orientation, but also in terms of financial background. The aim of the school over the next five years was to raise R100 million, which would allow the school to widen access to a Bishops education by increasing the proportion of College students receiving financial assistance from the current 12%, up to 20%.
In his final Principal’s report at Prizegiving, Guy Pearson listed his “4 pillars of Bishops”. First, Diocesan College welcomed boys of all faiths but chapel was central. Second, Bishops was a boys’ school, and being a boys’ school gave the school the ideal opportunity to address issues around being male and how men should treat and respect women. Thirdly, the House system and pastoral care was a central feature of the wider curriculum that the school provided. And fourthly, the school’s philosophy of educating the ‘whole boy’ shaped the curriculum. The school continued striving to strike the right balance between the academic, sporting, and cultural programmes.
The end of year activities continued – the Grade 10s went off on Epic; 29 boys were on exchange during the third and fourth terms, and various tours took place: Fencing to Germany; Rugby to Ireland; Golf and Squash to UK; and Tennis to UK.
2020 was going to be a bumper year – everything was lined up for success. The School play was a full-blown production of Hamlet, which was able to be staged as the Bishops school plays usually were produced in March.
And then COVID struck and the country-wide enforced lockdown on 23 March brought most of school life to a screeching halt.
The school had to make some rapid adjustments to cope with the imposed conditions of lockdown. Having the well-established Intranet and laptops gave a start, but staff had to make incredible adaptations to the way classes and teaching happened, so that the school would be able to continue with a solid teaching programme. Some remote meetings were possible online, some matters were simply postponed till the return to normal.
For the academic programme, the school decided on a synchronous model, maintaining the regular timetable, with the classes meeting the teacher at the start of each lesson through Microsoft Teams and relying on the Intranet to direct the activities required for the lesson. The IT staff led the way and teachers had to make sudden and drastic changes to the way they taught. The Intranet of learning resources, which had been started in 1999 enlarged exponentially as the entire curriculum went digital. Other aspects of school life were also disrupted. For the bulk of the second term all classes were online, with only the matrics returning to campus for the final nine academic days of the second term. Every boy entering the campus had to be tested for temperature. Society meetings stopped until the staff adjusted to the new reality and began setting up online events. Chapel and Assemblies went online during the lockdown period and Eisteddfod had to be cancelled, as was a planned 2-team cricket tour to the UK in the June/July holiday.
While fundraising efforts had to be paused, the Trust used this time to focus their planning on future fundraising initiatives. There were strenuous efforts to improve communication and coordination between the Bishops Trust, the new OD Committee, and the school. As a result, there was a greater understanding of the roles and priorities of these three organisations, and an appreciation of the importance of working together, including on the 175 Campaign. However, no money was raised during the pandemic.
The VUSA academy had to suspend coaching and peer-to-peer teaching but set in place food supplies to township members who were left with nothing.
The Sports Performance And Wellness Programme was introduced in 2020. Its reach covered all three schools, and its key function was delivering a structured programme to address the variety of sports that Bishops offered. The programme started at the Pre-Prep and focussed on motor neuron and co-ordination, and then developed to more specialised development and focussed conditioning at the College, as well as the general wellness of the boys. The unit consisted of bio-kineticists, two strength and conditioning specialists, and two physiotherapists.
Following the directions of the Sustainability programme, new bins were introduced for waste disposal, and PV panels were set in place on many of the building roofs to secure a more constant electricity supply.
The last months of Guy Pearson’s tenure as Principal were not easy for the school. In November 2019, a female member of staff resigned with immediate effect after allegations surfaced that she had been having sexual relations with some of the senior boys. No action could be taken as none of the boys was prepared to lay charges, and an independent investigation by the school could not find sufficient evidence to proceed in any way further. Covid really disrupted the functioning of the school and significant adjustments had to be speedily made. And then, in June, the matrics marched down the Avenue, gathered outside the Memorial Chapel, and presented the school with a Memorandum of Demands, arising out of the worldwide surge in concern for human rights, racism and inequality, as evidenced by the Black Lives Matter movement.
The school executive met with senior pupil leadership, recognized the concern about the injustices of the past, and agreed that this would be dealt with in full by Tony Reeler when he took up office from 1 July.
The farewell to Guy and Maree was unique in that it was online. Greg Brown hosted a number of warm tributes paid by boys and staff. This was followed by an interview with Guy who was able to articulate his philosophies as his term ended. The ending of the online presentation was a final blessing in an empty Chapel, and Guy and Maree exiting through the north door.
