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A review of the Musical Theatre Concert & how to engage young people of different ages in musicals

Ms Katie Butler, Performing Arts Assistant, looks back to our recent Musical Theatre Concert here at WHS, as well as how we can engage different age groups in this popular form.

From Tap Dancing to Trunchbull

This year’s Musical Theatre Concert featured a selection of solos, duets and group numbers, with the very on-brand Wimbledon High theme of “Imagine”. This enabled us to tie numbers together through a common thread, while still allowing us to explore all sorts of different styles and stories. We hired in professional choreographer Lily Howkins to help create more specialised dance numbers, along with a brilliant three-piece band who really brought the music to life. This concert showcases the singing and dancing talents of girls across the senior school, providing a chance for Year 7s to perform with Sixth Formers, and for younger girls to have a taste of solo singing without the pressure of a whole show.

Sweeney Todd
Sweeney Todd was the WHS Senior Musical, with performances in January 2019

After Lilly and Emma kicked off the show with ‘Pure Imagination’ from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we enjoyed Year 8’s spectacular ‘Revolting Children’ from Matilda, featuring ten girls stepping out of their sensible Wimbledon High personas and into a rebellious, anti-Trunchbull mob, with ties tied around their heads and hockey sticks as weapons. We featured more Year 8 talent in the upbeat, energetic Hollywood party number ‘Someone in the Crowd’ from La La Land, with Lauren, Amelia, Phoebe and Alyssa combining pitch-perfect vocals with challenging choreography to their usual high standard.

Another choreography highlight was the tap-toed delight that was ‘Singin’ in the Rain’, with Melody and Lizzy’s vocals combined with the brilliant tap skills of Jasmine and Shangavi. Musical theatre stalwart Erin gave a convincing performance as Evan Hansen, showing real resilience and deftly taking on various characters throughout the night. Sweeney Todd’s ‘By the Sea’ and ‘Seventeen’ from Heathers were presented together, as despite the different musical styles and the twenty-five years between their creation, they explore very similar themes of women trying to convince murderous men to live a normal life with them. For the latter, Erin was joined by Lizzie, who also showcased her fantastic vocal versatility in the contrasting ‘I Feel Pretty’. All in all, it was a wonderful celebration of dramatic skill and musicianship from the entire WHS community.

Little Shop of Horrors
This dramatic moment from Little Shop of Horrors – the Year 9 and 10 musical in June 2018

Curating a Programme

As a facilitator of these kinds of events, the challenge for me was to choose a programme that was varied, interesting, and age-appropriate, engaging all the girls. Appreciation of musical theatre, and indeed of all strands of the arts and storytelling deepens with age, maturity, and life experience, and personal development is particularly accelerated during these teenage years; it’s the reason that Year 11 can sob their way through Les Miserables, yet many Year 8s are twiddling their thumbs by ‘I Dreamed a Dream’, and I was keen to curate a concert that reflected this and provided something for everyone to enjoy.

While we had Year 12 Izzy performing the wistful ‘The Movie in My Mind’ from Miss Saigon, a ballad by a Thai showgirl during the Vietnam War dreaming of a better life, we also enjoyed Izzy from Year 8’s delicately beautiful rendition of ‘Jenny’s Piano Song’ from Howard Goodall’s little-known 2010 musical Love Story (an adaptation of the 1970 film), as well as Anna’s (Year 11) infectiously positive ‘I Can Hear the Bells’ from Hairspray.

The key to a successful programme is contrast – and so with powerhouse, belting performances like Anna’s and Eleni’s rendition of ‘Let Me Be Your Star’ from NBC’s Smash, we also had numbers like Anna’s (Year 13) genuine and engaging ‘I’m Not Afraid of Anything’ from Jason Robert Brown’s song cycle Songs for a New World, and Eleni’s other number, the vulnerable ‘When He Sees Me’ from Waitress, showing off her real versatility as an actress, and brilliant comic timing.

Other performances included the wittily staged ‘Show Off’ from The Drowsy Chaperone by Jasmine & Lilly in Year 12, and the always brilliant Musical Theatre Choir taking on an arrangement of Hamilton’s Helpless that even girls much older and more experienced would have found challenging. As Year 7 girls took to the stage with a lively Disney medley, featuring solos from Melina, Martha, Hannah and Sophia, it was clear that the future of musical theatre at Wimbledon High is in very safe hands. We ended the show with two more similar numbers: ‘The Life I Never Led’ from Sister Act and ‘Nothing Stops Another Day’ from Ghost, sensitively performed by Millie and Shangavi (Year 12) respectively, followed by a rousing ‘We’re All In This Together’ from the upcoming Year 9 & 10 production of High School Musical.

Musical Theatre: more than jazz hands

Having a concert solely dedicated to musical theatre, and particularly lots of different numbers from different shows, allows students to experiment with the differences between acting through song compared to acting through prose, and how despite the snobbery that often surrounds it, musical theatre absolutely provides as much opportunity to get stuck into interesting, complicated characters as straight theatre.

For next year’s concert, I’m keen to develop this further, delving into shows by writers like Sondheim that challenge these stereotypes better than anything else. As a writer of musical theatre myself, I’m particularly interested in using platforms like this to explore adolescent pastoral themes, and with shows like Dear Evan Hansen and Heathers featured, we were able to open up conversations about darker issues like mental health, bullying and violence in schools, performing songs from musicals that wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate as school productions, but that are absolutely worthy of attention and that many of the girls know and love.

I also hope that it introduced both cast and audience to some lesser-known shows, further fuelling their interest in and passion for musicals, and that it demonstrates the versatility of musical theatre as an art form, showing that it isn’t all jazz hands and happy endings, but can be a medium to explore all manner of themes, issues and musical styles.

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Year 12 EES team triumphs!

We are very proud of  our Year 12 Engineering Education Scheme team who went to the ICBT STEM Festival at the BP Headquarters in Sunbury. They explained to the judges their design for an urban park structure, and all of the engineering considerations that they had made. They were delighted to be awarded  the “Contribution to Business Award 2019”. Huge thanks to their mentors at Ramboll and to Saranya for all the support, and to BP for hosting the event. It was all fantastic practice for our future engineers!

 

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IET Faraday Challenge Day in the Junior School

We were very excited to run a Primary IET Faraday Challenge Day this week for teams from 6 different primary schools including Wimbledon High. We welcomed teams of 6 girls from Corpus Christi Catholic Primary, West Wimbledon Primary, The Study Prep, Wimbledon Chase Primary and Coombe Hill Juniors. The engineering challenge involved designing and making a prototype lighthouse keeper transfer system, and presenting their product to the other groups at the end of the day. Each team worked together to plan their initial ideas, develop their final idea, and then make, test and improve what they designed. The teams were all fantastic, demonstrating a great deal of creativity, imagination, scientific knowledge and resilience, in what was a rather demanding task! The teachers’ team also worked very hard and were very competitive!

At the end of the day, all of the schools were complimented on the standard of their work. Coombe Hill Juniors won the prize for innovation with their ambitious motorised pulley system. West Wimbledon had a fantastic winder device and Corpus Christi Catholic Primary School were full of creative ideas and worked incredibly well together, with their impressive project manager, Cami at the helm. Well done to all our future engineers!

 

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Year 3 enjoy science fieldwork at Juniper Hall

It may have been raining rather a lot, but year 3 had a fabulous time carrying out some scientific field work on their residential trip to Juniper Hall. They worked really hard to think about the adaptations of the animals and plants in the various habitats and took part in a great range of activities. They set humane mammal traps and were very excited indeed to find a vole or two. The voles ran away very quickly, but not before we managed to get a good look at them. Many invertebrates were collected using sweep nets, sheet traps and pooters in the meadows and under the trees. We were amazed to find that our invertebrate colour predictions turned out to be correct. It was great fun to then go pond dipping and look at what we found under microscopes. Thank you so much to the Field Studies Council – it was an amazing trip! Year 3 will tell you which of the teachers had the best invertebrate “moves”!

 

 

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GDST Junior Science Conference at the Royal Institution

Engineering 2018

The second ever GDST Junior Science Conference was held at the Royal Institution on May 2nd. It was an incredible privilege to take over such an iconic building for the day, which over the centuries has been the workplace of such scientific giants as Michael Faraday and Humphrey Davy. Year 5 pupils from the GDST schools entered via the Grand Staircase ready for a day full of scientific excitements. They worked in the L’Oreal lab looking at the chemistry and physics of colour, took part in a workshop about the perception of colour, heard a talk from the RI Heritage team about the significance of the building and it’s scientists, and completed a quiz as they explored the building and the museum. It was a truly special day for the year 5 girls as they made new friends and were inspired by all they saw and took part in. Parents joined us at the end of the day for the Science Spectacular which with all the explosions and demonstrations was definitely spectacular! Mrs Farrer also got a very special treat… she gave a presentation in the famous Faraday Lecture Theatre, entitled “What does a scientist look like?”. Certainly a very hard moment to beat for a science teacher!

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Should the periodic table be turned upside down?

Chemistry beakers

Isabel, Y10, explores the comprehensibility of Dmitri Mendeleev’s traditional periodic table and whether it would be more accessible for younger children and enhance learning methods if it were flipped around by 180˚.

The Periodic Table is an important symbol in Chemistry and since Dmitri Mendeleev’s discovery of the Periodic system in 1869, it has remained the same for 150 years; but could turning it 180˚ make important concepts easier to understand, especially in teaching younger children?

This year has been announced the Year of (Mendeleev’s) Periodic Table which has become the generic way of arranging the elements. However, some scientists like Martyn Poliakoff and his team have started to question the comprehensibility of it. After extensive research, they decided to flip the traditional arrangement upside down, so that the information is more understandable and intuitively ordered.

The research team argues that this presentation is more helpful and has many benefits. Firstly, when the table is flipped the properties of the elements such as atomic mass and proton number now increase from bottom to top therefore making more numerical sense. Secondly, it represents the Aufbau principal more accurately, which states that electrons fill up ‘shells’ from low to high energy. Finally, when young children are trying to learn from the table, the more relevant elements to them are located towards the bottom of the table, making its use quicker and more accessible. Therefore, in lessons, students will not have to look all the way to the top of the table to be able to find the right information.

Above: Inverted Periodic Table. Source: University of Nottingham
Above: Traditional Periodic Table

However, when I compared the two versions of the periodic table myself, I found that the traditional form of the table made more sense to me for many reasons. For example, in both situations I found my eyes drawn to the top row of elements, so it did not matter that the elements that I use the most were on the bottom row. However, this could be put down to a force of habit, so I also asked my 10-year-old brother to look at the two perspectives of the table and see where he looked. He immediately pointed to the top of both and when I asked him the reason he said that from top to bottom ‘is the way you read’ so the properties make more sense going down from top to bottom. He also seemed to prefer the traditional table, commenting that it was like a ‘pyramid’ in the way the numbers were arranged and was a much clearer way to display the elements.

Whilst some may argue that the arrangement of the table is more effective if it were upside down, for me the traditional version of the periodic table works just as well. Testing this principle to a larger group will allow different models to be tried to see if it makes understanding the periodic table easier for younger learners.

References:

Martyn Poliakoff et al, Nat. Chem., 2019, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-019-0253-6

 

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Are we entering a golden age of careers education and guidance in schools?

Like a boss mug

Mrs Nicola Cooper, Director of Higher Education and Careers at WHS, explores the impact of the Gatsby benchmarks on careers education in schools.

If like me, you finished school before the turn of the millennium, I suspect that your experience of careers education and guidance as a teenager may well have been rather uninspiring. My only recollection is of a hurried conversation with my form tutor in which I enthusiastically expressed an interest in becoming an air hostess, only to have it swiftly dismissed as a totally unsuitable career for an academic student. Even at university the options put forward by the advisers seemed limited to accountancy, retail, teaching or law.

Thankfully those dark days of careers education, information and advice as – at best –  a desirable added extra, are long gone. Nowadays all schools are well aware that helping students to think about and prepare for their working life is a central part of what we do.

The importance of careers education in schools was given a significant boost in 2013 when the Gatsby Foundation commissioned Sir John Holman – Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at the University of York, senior education adviser and former headteacher, to produce a report setting out what career guidance in England would look like if it achieved a ‘good’ rating by international standards.[1]

The eight ‘benchmarks’ proposed by Holman in his report represent a clearly defined framework that significantly raises the bar in the area of careers work in schools.[2] Subsequent to the publication of the report, the Gatsby benchmarks were explicitly referenced throughout the Department of Education’s Careers Strategy[3] and now form a key part of new Statuary Guidance for careers.[4]

The Gatsby Benchmarks
Figure One: The Gatsby Benchmarks

[1] https://www.gatsby.org.uk/education/focus-areas/good-career-guidance

[2] https://www.gatsby.org.uk/education/focus-areas/good-career-guidance

[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/careers-strategy-making-the-most-of-everyones-skills-and-talents

[4] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/careers-guidance-provision-for-young-people-in-schools

Implementing Gatsby

In the last couple of years addressing the so-called ‘Gatsby benchmarks’ has become a strategic objective for all schools (they will form part of the Ofsted framework from 2020). For those of us tasked with leading CEIAG (careers education, information and guidance), their robust nature presents an exciting, if somewhat daunting challenge. Our response here at WHS has been to view the framework as an opportunity to take a completely fresh look at our provision. An initial audit of existing activities against the eight aspects identified by Holman helped identify a number of key areas in which we could develop and extend our programme.

Personalised guidance

Gatsby identifies personal guidance and addressing the needs of each pupil as a key feature of excellent careers advice and guidance. Student review and reflection, already a key feature of the pastoral system at WHS, will in the future also include discussions around more careers related values, interests and aptitudes.  Along with formal 1 to 1 guidance interviews for every student at both KS4 and KS5 and access to labour market information through online platforms such as Fast Tomato and Unifrog, we can now be confident that all our girls have access accurate and up to date advice appropriate to their individual requirements.

‘Real life’ experiences

One of the biggest challenges all schools face in addressing Gatsby is increasing the level of engagement students have with employers and the world of work.  There is a strong empirical base for the benefits of ‘real life’ experiences, on self-development, employability, earnings potential[1] but a combination of health and safety and safeguarding concerns along with the timetable demands placed on teachers by new more rigorous GCSE and A level specifications can mean organising opportunities to meet with employers and experience the world of work can be difficult.

We have had to think creatively and look for innovative ways of bringing the world of work to our students. Running off-timetable enterprise and employability days for Year 9 and 10, inviting speakers (often parents and alumnae) to talk to groups of students informally over a series of lunchtime ‘Getting into…’ talks and sending Year 8 girls off to spend a day at work with a parent or family member are just some of the ways we have sought to increased understanding of working life.

Developing partnerships

One of the more unexpected consequences of the increased focus on CEIAG has been the added impetus for collaboration between schools. This year, working with a colleague at Raynes Park High School, we have established the Merton and Kingston Schools’ Careers Advisers Hub. Sharing expertise, working together to liaise with local chambers of commerce and opening up events like our recent higher education evening to partner schools has not only been an extremely satisfying and enjoyable but also mutually beneficial experience, to both staff and students.

The Striding Out Programme

Striding Out LogoThe biggest impact of Gatsby has been to act as a framework on which we have built our brand new Striding Out programme, which embraces the concept of a truly holistic approach to career and higher education preparation.

The programme consists of three strands; Explore, Equip and Experience – E3 with the key aim of providing all students, from Year 7 through to 13, with opportunities to explore the vast range of higher education and career options available, equip themselves with the skills required for a successful career in the 21st century and gain valuable experience of the world of work.

Response to the changes from students, parents and staff has been overwhelmingly positive so far. Moving forward, having established a coherent and cohesive structure, we are now in a strong position to grow, adapt and develop the programme. This will include working more closely with Heads of Department to explore ways of embedding CEIAG into the curriculum.

A Golden Age?

So to address the question proposed at the start of this article: are we entering a ‘brave new world’ of careers education in schools?

I am convinced that Gatsby has been a force for good; it quite rightly puts CEIAG at the heart of what we do in schools. The core principles of access to up to date information, personalised advice and the opportunity to meet with employers and experience the world of work certainly represent the Gold Standard. However, there is no doubt that addressing the benchmarks is an ongoing challenge, it requires time, resourcing and the cooperation of colleagues across the school, particularly senior management. I have been very fortunate to have had unwavering support for all of the new initiatives we have introduced but I know that for other colleagues, particularly those working in the state sector, money and time is in short supply. So a golden age? We might not be there quite yet but there is an army of dedicated and inspiring careers leaders working in school who now have a robust framework to work towards. As such, from where I am standing, the future certainly looks bright.

[1] http://www.educationandemployers.org/research/the-employer-engagement-cycle-in-secondary-education-analysing-the-testimonies-of-young-british-adults/   http://www.educationandemployers.org/research/work-experience-impact-and-delivery-insights-from-the-evidence/

 

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Keio Yokohama Elementary School visits the STEAM space!

We were delighted on Friday to welcome students from Keio Yokohama Elementary School in Japan. They had been taking part in exciting lessons, trips and events all week and this was their last lesson whilst on their visit to England. Time for some STEAM fun! They were challenged to make slime in different colours and then test their slime to find out more about it’s rather strange properties. We looked at, and timed, the slime flowing in our slime races, measured how high it could bounce, and also had a good play of course. It was then time to build some spaghetti towers. The students found this much more tricky and as they only had 25 spaghetti sticks and 10 marshmallows in each team, it was challenging. They were tasked with building the tallest freestanding tower. Tricky decisions had to be made – all in a day’s work in the STEAM space!

Bye – bye to you all. We loved seeing you and we look forward to seeing you again in October in Japan!