A School Built on Ethos

A case study of the power of ethos, how ideas can catch on and be developed in a school, and how this can drive pupils towards academic success. Harris Westminster Sixth Form has had enormous success in providing an academic education for students of all socio-economic backgrounds.

This success is grounded in the development of a scholarly ethos that guides students and staff into successful habits - and that has been driven and disseminated through the delivery of weekly, whole-school assemblies.

In A School Built on Ethos, founding principal James Handscombe takes readers through the school's development and illustrates its journey by sharing a selection of the assemblies that have underpinned and elucidated its ethos. In doing so he offers guidance on how a staple of school life - the assembly - can be used differently and powerfully to shape a community, and shares transferable lessons on how they can be planned and delivered effectively.

James also discusses the challenges the school faced during its creation and offers an improved understanding of how academic and scholarly learning can be delivered and developed in a school - whether it be newly formed or already established.

About the Author

James Handscombe studied mathematics at Oxford and Harvard before training to be a teacher. He worked in schools in south Wales, Australia and south-east London before becoming the founding principal of Harris Westminster Sixth Form in 2014. He occasionally gets invited to speak at conferences and sometimes finds time to write things - mostly articles for the TES and letters to the editor of The Times , but he's also written for Schools Week and The Spectator's Coffee House blog.