English Department Partnerships
Within Eton’s English Department, many partnership opportunities have been created with local schools. This includes joint Societies, events and competitions.
Activities
Joint reading group between Eton and Holyport College.
Joint writing workshops with Holyport College.
Journalism Society attended by local students.
Joint poetry competition with LAE.
Background
he Huxley Society is a literary reading group. Each society has a student leader called a ‘secretary’, this year the secretary was a student from Holyport, who has proved remarkably efficient at organising events, even inviting an author, Chelsea G. Summers, into Eton in September 2022. Between September 21 and August 22 we had Charles Cumming OE, author of Box 88 in; Chloe Aridjis, author Sea Monsters; Jasper Gibson OE, author of The Octopus Man, all of which were attended by Holyport students. Several students from Holyport and their teacher were able to attend the society dinner with Charles Cumming before the talk. When also met to discuss the books, over drinks and snacks in a more relaxed setting in Eton. We are now expanding the society to incorporate Windsor Girls’ and Windsor Boys’ School who we are hoping will appoint respective secretaries in the New Year.
We also take part in writing workshops with Holyport. We invited the two authors, Chloe Aridjis and Jasper Gibson, to take part in writing workshops in Summer 2022, in which a third of the students were from Holyport. This academic year, 2022, Holyport invited Eton students to partake in a poetry slam workshop with the poetry slam world champion, Harry Baker. Our partnership work flows both ways.
The most popular English based society is Journalism Society which continues to draw weekly listeners from partnership schools. We always have a strong attendance from Holyport and quite often a few students from Windsor Boys’ and Windsor Girls’ School. Our most popular speakers have been Mishal Hussain drawing 121 students about 30 of which were from partnerships schools, Ruth Sherlock and Paul Wood, two war correspondents who drew an audience of 115, 20 of which were from partnership schools; Michael Binyon OBE of which about a fifth were from partnership schools, and Angelos Frangopoulos who drew a partnership schools audience of about a fifth, too.
We were also able to share joint judging of The Poetry by Heart competition for the last two years with LAE. LAE’s students were successful enough so as to be invited to the national final, held in the Globe Theatre. Specialist beaks from English were able to meet with the LAE online, hear their pieces, judge their competition and met subsequently with the winners from the internal LAW competition to hone technique and give advice for the live final.