Education | ED03 | Summer 2016

Sponsored by
Tunbridge Wells
Edinburgh Award Scheme and the
School Cadet Force. On Saturday
mornings, pupils can choose from a
menu of activities including Creative
Writing, International Cuisine,
Open Art and Music & Dance.
university academics. Trips are a vital
aspect of our educational provision
and we offer far too many to list
in full. However, our pupils have
recently visited New York, Iceland,
Berlin and Spain to name but a few.
Ed O’Connor,
Deputy Head, St Edmund’s
School Canterbury
Does your school give
equal weight to nonacademic
subjects?
We fully understand the importance
of challenging our pupils to develop
outside the classroom. To that end we
have a comprehensive extra-curricular
programme designed to develop
personal qualities, creativity and
leadership skills. Friday afternoons are
dedicated to our Skills and Services
programme which includes characterbuilding
opportunities including
Community Service, the Duke of
Are pupils encouraged to
follow a creative career?
St Edmund’s has a long and wellfounded
reputation in the creative
subjects. Music, Art and Design and
Drama are recognised strengths of the
school and offer fantastic opportunities
for expression and performance at a
high level. Many of our pupils go on to
leading drama schools, conservatoires
and art colleges. Developing individual
creativity is in our school DNA.
How does the school help to
broaden horizons?
We have a programme of lunchtime
visiting speakers called “The Curiosity
Shop” to which all pupils and parents
are invited. These are highly successful
events and we have had presentations
from a representative of Bletchley
Park on the Enigma Machine, from a
leading UK actress on careers in film
and theatre and from a number of
What interesting careers have
pupils gone on to follow?
New pupils to the school often ask to
be placed in Orlando Bloom’s House
as he is an old boy of the school!
Concert pianist Freddy Kempf visits us
regularly and has run masterclasses for
our pupils and we are proud of Darren
Henley OBE who is currently the Chief
Executive of the Arts Council. Those
who keep an eye on the news might
also have recently noted the name
of Sanjeev Gupta, the international
businessman involved in the Port
Talbot steel works takeover. Our pupils
go off into a huge range of careers,
equipped I hope with the assurance,
resilience and creativity developed as
part of a St Edmund’s education.
St Edmund’s School Canterbury,
St Thomas’ Hill, Canterbury, Kent
CT2 8HU, 01227 475600
www.stedmunds.org.uk
Guest Speaker – Sutton
Valence School
David Hayman
Having left Sutton Valence School in
1995, where he was Head of School
and Head of CCF, David Hayman
studied veterinary medicine at the
University of Edinburgh, and then
worked as a clinical veterinary surgeon
with a broad range of domestic and
wild animals, gaining experience of
investigating and managing disease
in a number of critically endangered
and flagship species. These experiences
are what led him to gain his MSc
in Conservation Biology from the
Durrell Institute of Conservation and
Ecology at the University of Kent,
UK. Prior to his role as a Senior
Lecturer in Veterinary Public Health at
Massey, where he works now, he also
did a considerable amount of work
in the USA as a David Smith Fellow
at Colorado State University.
David Hayman was recently
featured at the Massey University of
New Zealand’s ‘Defining Excellence
Awards 2016’. Dr Hayman is
considered a rising star in the field of
infectious disease epidemiology and
ecology. He has attracted considerable
international attention for his work
on Ebola and other related diseases.
It is only four years since he
did his PhD at Queen’s College,
Cambridge, which included a threeyear
fellowship funded by The
Wellcome Trust. He studied bats
and their diseases in West Africa; this
work formed the foundation of a lot
of the work he does. He has already
had 40 peer-reviewed publications in
high-ranking journals, including one
on modelling bat viruses. This is of
enormous importance internationally,
given the role played by bats in
emerging infectious disease. “I use
multidisciplinary approaches to address
how infectious diseases are maintained
within their hosts and how the process
of emergence occurs,” he said. “At the
broadest level, my interests are public
health and conservation biology.”
Sutton Valence Preparatory School, Church
Road, Chart Sutton, Kent ME17 3RF.
01622 842117. www.svs.org.uk
www.wealdentimes.co.uk
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