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 Turney Special School in Dulwich, 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 ten 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. It’s fun for the mentors too! Who can deny that they enjoy painting giants, being the old woman in ‘The Great Big Enormous Turnip’ and designing firework safety posters? asks Alex Butterworth.    We were delighted when one of the children, Janessa, who attends 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. Her mentor was Anna Clifford.

We know that we are lucky with our sports’ facilities: the playing fields, all-weather pitch, dance studio 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 six schools in our pool 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, 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. New developments here, including the James Allen’s Music Centre, will be eco-buildings.

We have expertise to share with prospective teachers and we work productively on a school-based initial teacher training scheme, the South London Consortium (SLC) where trainees work with us and other schools, state and independent, towards an Open University PGCE and Qualified Teacher Status. 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 this year for the nine schools in the Southwark Schools Learning Partnership ( SSLP ) is Child Voice.

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 music by Verdi, Puccini, Dvorak, Bruckner, Holst and Handel at St Barnabas, Dulwich.  JACO, the James Allen's Community Orchestra have just given a triumphant display of their musical prowess in a concert featuring Shostakovitch's 5th Symphony.

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, showed Turney Special School children from Years 8 and 9 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!   Children from Bessemer Grange School have helped Dave Strong to plant a hundred trees in the past year. 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.

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. Chandni Mahtani enjoyed her elderly lady’s companionship and found she herself had lots to learn from the stories May told her. Several girls have used free time during the school day to work in neighbouring Bessemer Grange and at Kingswood and at Heber School, sharing DT, IT, science, art and drama skills. 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.

Teachers, too, are keen to share their expertise, sometimes in a rather unexpected way! If you had been at JAGS on 3 July 2007, you might have been a witness to a ‘murder’, (the first, to our knowledge, on the school site) and questioned by PC Lambert, our Community Police Liaison Officer. The Forensics Day linked Year 9s from JAGS with St Saviour’s and St Olave’s, and taught them the basic skills they needed to solve the ‘crime’. With and without government funding, state and independent schools are working together in a hugely successful and inspiring way.  

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