LD: Hello Charles. It’s lovely to catch up finally. It’s been far too long. Let’s get stuck in. What is the process for 16+?
CF: Students select four subjects they’re interested in, then sit a paper in those subjects that my teachers will mark. These are not binding choices, though. Girls can still change their minds afterwards.
What level are those tests? GCSE or higher?
They’re GCSE-level papers. They’re only at the beginning of year 11, after all. I also have prospective girls take a Yellis test, which is an aptitude test of sorts and I think that it’s a very good test to do. Sometimes it’s quite revealing, particularly if the student is coming from a less advantaged background. Whereas teachers may take note of all of the things the girls can’t do, the Yellis test will pick up on some of the things they can do. I will want to have those pupils in the school, because if suddenly I can see that this child is in the 98th or 99th percentile, I’m going to say, well, let’s give her a try, shall we?
She’s got potential.
Exactly. We’ve got 30 girls coming on Friday, which is pretty good, actually. In the past, we’ve only had a dozen or so. I think our stock is quite high for 16+.
With the extension to the school that was undertaken a few years ago, how much space did that give you?
We’ve got a new drama studio. We’re using a lot of space—four or five rooms—in the Rudolph Steiner House next door. I’ve got a shop down the road as well, which is called the Ivor Place Seminar Room, and there’s a laundrette I’ve got my eye on, too. You’ve got to be quite entrepreneurial, I think. There are no big buildings that we can buy, and I’m not planning on building up as it’s prohibitively expensive, but I’ve got the crypt in the church, the rooms next door and the shop to ensure we have the facilities we need. That extra space has allowed us to expand the sixth form centre, and designate more private study space for our sixth form students. This year we’ve got about 60 girls in the upper sixth. Seventeen are applying for Oxford or Cambridge. They might not all get in, but I rather admire their aspiration. My feeling is that 10 years ago, we might have had some girls shying away from those prestige universities, but sometimes we take knocks in our lives, don’t we? I would much rather our girls strived for excellence and took some risks than stay within their comfort zone.
Do you think that you have that attitude because you’ve been there, seen it, done it at City of London Boys School for so many years?
When I first took the job here, but before I started, there were a couple of letters written to the chairman of governors saying, you know, it’s outrageous that you’ve appointed a man to a girls’ school. What a terrible role model for our girls. So, in my first week, I did a sort of meet the parents, and one of the parents—whose daughter is in the upper sixth now—came to me and said, Hello Mr. Fillingham, are you a feminist? I didn’t know what the right answer was. I was completely nonplussed. Should I say yes? Should I say no? But looking back over five years now, the children are surrounded by fantastic role models in the form of their teachers and their mothers, and in the people they come across.
I’ve brought in a lot of guest speakers, serious women of influence, that I started about a month after I arrived. We do it in the spring term every year. We get in politicians, captains of industry, all of them women, to come in and speak to the girls at assembly. Sometimes they’re old girls, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they’re people I know, and other times they’re people I’ve been cheeky enough to write to. It’s quite a good line to say, you know, here I am, the male head teacher at an all-girls school, could you find time? And people come. So, I think the role model position concern is safe, and having been in the post for some years now, I think I’m actually quite a champion of women’s rights. I don’t think I realised that five years ago.
Have you found, statistically speaking, that the subjects that girls choose have changed since you’ve arrived?
Has it changed? Yes. There are more girls taking maths and sciences now. I do think that that’s more of a national trend than something coming from me specifically, though, as there hasn’t been much of an uptick in our girls taking French or German, unfortunately. That being said, we do offer French, German, Spanish and Italian, which are thriving. We have classes every week, unlike other schools where some modern languages, especially German, have simply fallen by the wayside. By subject, I supposed the successes of the school are the sciences and art. Last year, for example, we sent nine girls off to art college for foundation courses. Those are hard to get into. English is a very high performing A-level subject, as well as History and History of Art. We send a handful off to Oxford and Cambridge every year.
What about to the United States?
Six this year, which is around 10% of the year.
To Ivy Leagues?
Dartmouth, Duke, Brown. It’s a bit of a scatter gun.
Is that for sport or academics?
The ones that have gone tend to go for academics, and they tend to have an American background, American parents or something of an international persuasion. Most of our girls go to British universities. Occasionally Belgium or Holland, but pretty rarely. Quite consistently we’ve had around two girls a year go to medical school and two to American universities. This year, suddenly, it was six. This coming year, I suspect it could be more again. The sixth form, I anticipate, will be larger again next year. We’ve gone from about 100 to 120 this year, and I would guess that it’ll be nearer 130 next year, which is pretty good.
Do you have any tips for young women thinking about applying to FHS?
Well, my daughter doesn’t come here. She’s in year 8. She went to a state primary school and then swapped across to an independent secondary school. We had to do some prep for her. Primary school hadn’t prepared her at all. We used some online software, and there is a sort of knack to learning how these tests work, but my advice to parents applying here is that I don’t think they need to be constantly testing their children. Do a handful, get some practice, make sure they’re familiar with it. There’s little to be gained from doing a hundred. The consortium test that we have been using up until now is very good. It’s maths, English, verbal and non-verbal reasoning and a multiple choice, one of those ones where you fill in circles with a pencil. This year, we’re ISEB pre-test, the common pre-test, along with most of the North London consortium schools. It remains to be seen what happens next year, but I think it’s a sensible choice because you can take it on any day, you don’t have to all take it on the same day, and if you’re at prep school, you can take it at your own school. Also, it doesn’t matter when they take it as long as they take it in year 6. We prefer it to be done before Christmas, but if, for whatever reason, they can’t, it’s fine to take it in January.
Is there a reason why the North London consortium schools aren’t doing their own tests or is it simply because the ISEB has been around so much longer?
I think it’s possibly just for this year, possibly we’ll stick with the ISEB. It’s a very similar product to the previous test, the CEM, which came from Durham university. It’s very similar, but it’s online, and we had initially thought it was nice to have everyone into the school to take it. But we’ve learned over the last six to eight months that there are other ways to take it. We don’t need that day as a sales pitch. I also think that for 10-year-old girls, hawking from school to school, it’s not quite as exciting as we think it is. If they can just take it once and be done with it, so much the better. I’ve worked quite hard on getting people in this term, open mornings as such haven’t happened, but I’ve done about 15 open evenings with parents, socially distanced. It’s been important for me to at least get people in so that they can get a feel for the school. It’s a big decision sending your children to a school for seven years.
How many girls do you accept?
72, but I’ll send offers to well over 100 and interview about 300. We usually get around 650 applications, and as a school, we used to interview them all, but now we rank them and there is a grey area, but at a certain point there is an academic cutoff. We would interview the girl, sometimes in groups, that came 649th and we felt like we were leading her on a merry dance about how great it would be and that she would love it. It didn’t feel very honest. So, although it does mean that some journeys end sooner now that we have that cutoff, I think it is more honourable than leading them on. If possible, next year we will go back to doing a group interview because it’s quite interesting to see a little bit of group interaction, and I usually do all of those. I’ll see them in groups of six or 10.
What is it that you’re looking for in that interview?
I suppose that we’re looking for a little bit of spark, somebody who looks like they know where they are and they’re interested to be here. Sometimes, you can actually see that someone’s not interested. They might have come 50th in the test but she doesn’t want to come. She wouldn’t come even if I offered her a place so I won’t offer her a place, I’ll offer it to somebody else. I wouldn’t encourage children to pretend that this is their first choice and we would never ask them, because you’re setting a child up to tell a lie. We are are looking at whether they can do a maths paper, interpret a picture, read a poem and talk about it. We also look for whether they care. I already know whether they’re clever or not; I’ve got the test. Sometimes, they’ve got a real story to tell or they’re a bit quirky and they’ve come 300th, but they’re interested and interesting. I think it’s worth seeing people. I quite enjoy the admissions period after Christmas each year.
Looking to the future, is there anything you’d like to do or are looking to do at some stage?
One of the things that I’ve done…is half-finished, if you like. I’ve really tried to keep on top of the quality of how we teach and how children learn. Last year, I appointed a teacher who was in charge of this area of school life, which we’ve never had before. A director of teaching and learning. I’ve just finished a master’s course in learning and teaching at Oxford. I get the results next month…this month! I’ve certainly passed! But we will wait to see what grade I get.
Last year—and we will do it again this year—we had groups of teachers sit in select groups of seven or eight across the school to discuss the areas of school life they were most interested in. I had a group sitting in here and we were looking at educating the most able. You know, we were saying, well, what do you do in your lessons? How can we accommodate the most able? There was another group looking at pastoral care, another group looking at the least able. It was one of the most delightful couple of hours of the year. We met again six weeks later and six weeks after that, challenged each other, saying, well what are you going to try before I see you again? What are you going to do next? So, that sort of teaching and learning angle, I think, really feeds into the aspiration that’s growing in the school. Each successive cohort is more academic than the previous year in terms of entrance and aptitude tests. It’s getting harder to get into the school on that basis.
With the world how it is, more and more things are online, the working environment is changing. How are you teaching the girls to stand out in this new world?
One of the things that we’re pushing is internationalism. The idea is that we show the girls here—many of whom have international parents, though they’re thoroughly British—what it’s like, not just to see the sights but also to work in a foreign city. We have a partner school in Manhattan, the Chapin School, that we had a trip to. The girls saw the sights and everything, but they also spent several days sitting in lessons. Last year, we had some girls go to Singapore. They’ve got a good reputation for teaching maths, so I sent two girls from every year group to go an do maths in Singapore. And they had a great time, but they worked. At the same time, we took over some of the older girls to do some international work experience in Singapore. We’ve done the same for Canada and France, so the idea is that girls can see themselves not just visiting other countries but belonging to or making lives in other countries.
To come back to my previous example of these women of influence speakers and guests, we had somebody in who was a top psychologist, and her message to the girls was, you know that you can have it all, but it is jolly hard work to have it all. She showed us a picture of her family, “these are my children, I love them, this is the job I have now, this is the job that I’m going to get next. It is not easy to juggle motherhood and a career and I’m not going to try and kid you that it is, but you can do it.”
We had somebody come in who’s an alum at the school. She went to Oxford, and she’s only just finished. She’s got 1 million followers on Instagram and set up a business while studying. She’s set up another business now in athleisure wear. The girls know who she is; she’s quite famous. But the message is that it’s jolly hard. She’s set up a business, she’s learned new skills, appointed people to work for her, and all the way through university, she did have good fun but she also flogged herself for it.
One of the guest that I liked best was Estelle Morris. She used to be the schools minister around the year 2000. I saw her on the Tube, it was about 6:45 a.m., and it’s quite quiet at that time. I know that it was wrong, but I went up to her and enquired if she was indeed Baroness Morris. She said she was. This was somewhere between Victoria and Oxford Circus. We both changed at Oxford Circus and chatted all the way to school. I wrote her a letter a couple of days later sort of apologising for completely door-stopping her, then at the end was like, “by the way, would you like to give a talk?” And she did. She was a Labour peer and has an interesting story to tell about how she was a teacher, then a local councillor, an MP, Secretary of State and now a Baroness. It was really inspirational, and to be able to inspire people is a big part of what we do.
Thank you very much, Charles.
Thank you for having me, Leyla. It really was a pleasure.
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