This is a celebration of some of JAGS’ partnerships in the community, which have countless shared benefits. We have as much to learn from our involvement in classroom assistance at Bessemer Grange Primary or helping at the Kids Company centre in Camberwell, for example, as local people have to gain from extensive use of our buildings, sports facilities and teaching expertise. Just click on the links for our reports.

For twelve years JAGS has been a key player in the Southwark Literacy Scheme, hosted at JAGS on Saturday mornings, which helps children from local primary schools to improve their literacy skills, working towards meeting the basic level. The Saturday of National Book Week was a grand finale; everyone assembled for a colourful presentation in full costume of well known characters ranging from the Queen of Hearts to Spiderman and Darth Vader. The Silver Group based their writing on all their favourite characters from books and interviewed them in the ‘studio’. The development of confidence and skills over the year is clear. One little boy read his own delightful piece about an alien landing in Heber School playground and won everyone over with his giggles and obvious pleasure.  Another wrote an interview about the joys of being the World’s Tallest Man: The best thing about being tall is that you never get lost, explained Dontai, because you can look over the buildings and see where you are.

We were delighted when one of the children, Janessa, who was attending the scheme, was regional winner in the Special Achievement category of the Royal Mail’s Young Writers Competition 2006. She won £100 worth of book vouchers and £500 for the Literacy Scheme.

We know that we are lucky with our sports’ facilities: the playing fields, all-weather pitch, swimming pool, dance studios and sports hall. Year 12 girls training for their Community Sports Leader Award work practically at JAGS with another ten schools. To pass this award, you have to complete 3 sessions of being an umpire/referee/official in an event which qualified teachers set up, such as swimming galas, and netball matches. Once this is done, you have the opportunity to teach one lesson of sport to school groups who come to JAGS to use the fields and pitches. Hannah Beecham soon adopted a strategy that worked:  I took a warm up, skill practice and finally a match. I learnt that to make each child feel of worth and to make my teaching more personal,  I must pick up their names quickly, helping to keep the group’s focus,  mostly because they were shocked that I had remembered their names.

The JAGS Sports Club staff teach swimming to seven primary schools in our pool, as well as the Charter School, JAPS and JAGS, and run a full programme of sports and other life-enhancing activities for the local community. We host the London Schools’ Disability Swimming Gala and Southwark Primary Schools’ Swimming Gala, and the local community can opt for skills training in our Sports Academy , or enrol in Street Jazz, Martial Arts, Dulwich Devils Junior Football Club or the JAGS Fit Kids’ Camp, for example.

The whole school community is very conscious of the part we can play in conserving our environment and we are active participants in local initiatives such as Dulwich Going Greener and Safe Routes To School. 3 Year 9 pupils took part in a consultation with southwark Council about safe routes to school.  The whole of Year 9 spent a day enthusiastically exploring sustainability in four practical workshops led by the Sustainable Services Team from southwark. New developments here, including the James Allen’s Community Music Centre, (www.jags.org.uk/jacmc) will be eco-buildings.  Read more about us as an eco school here.

We have expertise to share with prospective teachers and we work in tandem with Kings College, London and the Institute of Education in the school-based training of classics and music teachers towards the PGCE qualification. As professionals we benefit hugely from the partnerships we have with other Southwark schools, state and independent, sharing our passions for our own subjects, and learning from each other in joint enquiries. The focus last year for the nine schools in the Southwark Schools Learning Partnership (SSLP) was Pupil Voice. The aim is to raise pupil achievement by enhancing pupils’ involvement in their own learning and by helping teachers to develop models of highly effective teaching. JAGS sometimes combines its pupils with those from other schools in an integrated learning experience, always worth more than the sum of the parts; Year 9 from St Saviour’s and St Olave’s and JAGS worked together on Creativity in Modern Foreign Languages. JAGS also hosts an annual Latino Day which engages pupils from three local academies and JAGS pupils in art and dance activities including salsa and flamenco, leading to a celebratory fiesta.

It’s busy at JAGS at weekends and during the holidays! Nearly five hundred boys and girls, age 3-18, from all over London take part in JASSPA, our Saturday School for the Performing Arts. JYT productions are open to the public. Any adult can join the JAGS Choral Society, this term working towards a exhilarating performance of Brahms' Requiem (sung in German). JACO, the James Allen’s Community Orchestra, for local musicians and senior girls, played a beautiful Beethoven piece, Coriolan Overture, and Brahms Symphony No. 2 in september in the newly refurbished Holst Hall at JAGS.  Their next concert is in March 2010 and will include Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto.

We are lucky to be able to enjoy and share fantastic resources with our neighbours. In our beautiful grounds the historic Botany Gardens, listed by English Heritage, are open to the public annually, and visited by other schools throughout the year.

		In the school holidays, Dave Strong, our Botany Gardens Manager and an environmental expert, helped by Year 10 girls, shows Turney Special School children and Bessemer Grange pupils what they could discover from pond-dipping. The Turney School boys loved the whirligig beetles and were even more enthusiastic about the ugly-looking dragonfly nymphs. Since then their teacher says they are constantly asking when they can come back!

Elderly people are now living it up at JAGS. Life on the EDGE, a new social club for local pensioners run by Dulwich Helpline, meets weekly in our Green Dale Hall. Starting with nothing more than a donated piano and a box of tea bags, it’s amazing what can be done! Guests can expect a sing-song, a chat and helpful visits from Safer Neighbourhood Police Officers, Community Wardens, Area Housing Officers and Ward Councillors.

Children from Bessemer Grange School have helped Dave Strong to plant a hundred trees in our grounds. Look beyond the weeping willow and you might spot a large sea-scape created by a Year 9 DT group from JAGS to enhance a concrete play area at Bessemer Grange primary school.

		The children of Bessemer Grange and their Art teacher, issued an attractive invitation, which some creative Year 12 pupils accepted, to join them in making art for their Art Week at the end of the summer term. It worked for everyone: the children had one to one attention from someone who wasn’t a teacher but who was exciting in a different way, and the Year 12 pupils, as Phoebe says, enjoyed the immediate impact of their influence.

We had just rushed from an art lesson and were still carrying our work journals so we offered to show the children what it is like to do ‘grown up’ art.  They were rapt by the images on the page. Their excitement about our art transferred to the prospect of creating their own work and everyone was eager to print their work as quickly as they could so that they would be able to see their colourful masterpiece on the fabric.  I would like to think that the fact that there were some ‘JAGS girls’ meant that they had fun and did some new and different things during Art Week that they will remember for a long time.

Going off-site puts our school lives into healthy perspective. After a visit to JAGS by Camila Batmanghelidjh, we have developed a strong link with The Arches, the Kids Company centre in Camberwell. Sixth formers from JAGS and Dulwich College visit every week to join the children in their Art projects, and in November Year 13 girls ran a Saturday of Art and Drama activities, so popular it will soon be repeated. It was certainly a challenge to find games that could entice both older children away from basketball, or from their seats round the edges of the hall, and engage primary children, some of whom came with their parents; but JAGS girls are rarely daunted. Katie Lawton, Year 13, said: I was really touched that the girl I was working with cared that we were there and making a difference.

JAGS girls have always contributed their time, energy and skills enthusiastically in Community Action, helping with the King’s Hospital Trolley Shop and reading to the vision-impaired as part of the Befriending Scheme organised by Dulwich Helpline (www.dulwich-helpline.org.uk). Girls make weekly visits to Athol House, a local Cheshire Home. Several girls have used free time during the school day to work in neighbouring Bessemer Grange, sharing DT, IT, science, art and drama skills in the nursery and throughout the school. For Leonie-Rae Gasson this was also a chance to assess herself and the privileges of her own school, sometimes taken for granted, from a different perspective, Knowing that you are making a big difference to someone’s life, making someone and yourself feel happier and more confident-ready to face the world! Maisie Richardson-Sellers has also been helping to teach speech and drama for about a year and half. She feels the changes she has seen in some of the children are amazing.

Our links with Kingswood School are emerging strongly; sixth formers have led Drama sessions and produced the school's first newsletter written by pupils.  Now after-school wrap around care has been revolutionised: JAGS sixth formers teach Music to 3-6 year olds, French, and a Gifted and Talented group.  In a pioneering Family learning initiative, they teach Spanish and Mandarin not only to the children who want to come, but to the whole family.

		We have great links with another local institution: Dulwich Picture Gallery (www.dulwichpicturegallery.org) and gave a Christmas concert there to elderly invited guests, and exhibited a fabulous collection of GCSE and A level art, ‘Drawn Together’, in February in the Linbury Room, to huge critical acclaim.

Dulwich Picture Gallery run inspired intergenerational art projects: the Good Times. Under the tutelage of a practising artist and the gallery’s education co-ordinator, the mixed company of the young from JAGS and the not-so-young plumb creative depths they didn’t know they had.

The project was enormous fun to take part in, especially in the last two weeks when old and young alike got to work on dressing up in weird and wonderful creations; anything that could be stuck down was used, including the foil from the biscuit wrappings! After that session they shouldn’t have been surprised by the final week’s instruction: ‘Change your look to something you’ve always wanted, but have never had the courage to do. The decorated faces that resulted were quite bizarre, but good fun, and, as Anna Bradshaw comments, gave us all a chance to unleash our inner rebel.

But our interest extends beyond this country. For the past eleven years, exceptional sixth-formers have been working with profoundly disabled orphans in a unique residential Community Action in Romania, which changes their whole perception of learning. In partnership with Christ’s Hospital School and, for the past two years, with the Children’s High Level Group (www.chlg.org) an international charity supported by J.K. Rowling and Baroness Emma Nicholson, JAGS girls have applied and been selected for a very demanding project for which they must research, plan carefully and fundraise for several months before the summer. The girls live and work in the placement centres together with abandoned children, many of whom have learning, behavioural and physical difficulties. The challenge is to plan and implement a two week programme of learning through fun, which involves sessions in Art, Craft, Music, Drama and Sport. Each year we pick a theme, to weld the activities together, and to give shape to the performance we give to the local community; this year’s theme was to tell the story of 'The Firebird'.

Most important to the plan, and what has made it a ground-breaking project throughout Romania and much of eastern Europe, is the involvement of local sixth formers, recruited by our partners in Romania from leading academic schools, to join the team and work with the JAGS girls to lead  the sessions and take responsibility for the children. The emphasis is very much on local self-sustainability, so that the project continues after we leave.

Ex-JAGS girls have returned to inspire us to collect for wonderful ventures in Malawi, for example, Tanya Clarke who project-managed a new school (www.build.malawi.org) and Tanya Whitty who teaches in a school in Tanzania; and we are supporting and following the news of Project Peru and Futuro Feliz, a charity helping street children in Peru, started by ex-JAGS teacher, Miss Maria Moore. Our completely pupil-run Gospel Choir have made long-term, fantastic connections with the Sparrows Foundation (www.sparrows)  and we were thrilled to host the world premier of their music-theatre performance, Lavela Ilanga when the Sparrows toured the UK in October 2008.

From Jackie Gallagher, the Sparrow Schools Educational Trust, South Africa Words cannot express how grateful we are for being hosted by you on our recent UK Drama tour. Becoming part of your community, even though only for a brief time, was truly a wonderful experience. The staff and cast members were truly touched by the incredible hospitality they received. The tour surpassed all our expectations and it was a success on so many levels. It is so heart-warming to know that there are people in the world who will go without, who will sacrifice and who will serve, so that others less fortunate than them can be blessed.

 

 

 

 

The support here for such projects is exceptional. When JAGS girls want to make a statement about something, they really go for it. The sixth form organisers of the 2010 multicultural evening used the theme Genesis to symbolise the wealth of different cultures we have here, sprung from the same roots. The celebration in our theatre and Holst Hall fused dance, drama, music and video, with tasters of food from around the world.

Lizzie Chenery from the charity Invisible Children was delighted to speak to the audience and to join in the fun, and even more pleased to know that £1,600 was raised, helping child victims in northern Uganda to have their own new beginnings www.invisiblechildren.com.

This year's multicultural evening, 'Genesis', will be in aid of the charity Invisible Children, and will be held in January 2010.

JAGS is all about passion and commitment; our enthusiastic links world-wide and with the local community are a clear demonstration of this.