Public Benefit, including how we work with local schools and the community, sharing resources and learning from one another.

On losing our Government Assisted Places in 1998 we immediately launched our own AP scheme, offering up to 100% fee remission, uniform, meals, transport & trips, currently to 17 pupils annually, but we are continually fundraising to increase this number. The average level of fees assistance at present is 88.8% of fees. The first three cohorts have now completed A levels and moved on to university with great success.

We offer placements for trainee teachers, 8 or 9 each year, including being part of an independent-state school SCITT since its inception in 2000, and have links with 4 HEIs.

JAGS has been working in partnership with the local and wider community and with local schools for many years and our Governors endorsed the explicit policy of being “Good Neighbours” in the 1990s. 

We have worked with local schools on Safe Routes to School and community travel plans.

We have become an Eco-School and supported local primary schools to do so.

Community Action has long been at the heart of JAGS, we were involved with the Peckham Settlement from its foundation in 1896.  Currently girls are engaged in a wide variety of regular activities: manning the local hospital trolley shop, helping with after-school clubs at local primary schools, supporting the teaching of art, drama, MFL and music at local primary schools, working with children with special needs, visiting the elderly, working on a special art project with the elderly at the local art gallery, visiting a Cheshire Home, playing music and singing to entertain local clubs and groups, teaching at a Saturday Supplementary School on a Southwark estate, working with Kids Company and working with Crisis.

All our sports facilities and a large ICT suite are open to the community first thing in the morning and from 6.00 p.m. Mon-Fri and all day and evening at weekends and during school holidays, via membership of our Sports Club.

Six local schools use our swimming pool regularly each week and our pool is used to host local and regional galas, including those for the disabled.

When a local state school was unable to use their own playing fields for two years (until this summer) we allowed them to hold all their games lessons on our fields free of charge.  Other local schools use our fields from time to time and we put a gate in the fence between us and our neighbouring primary school so that they have access whenever they wish, as they have no green space of their own.

Our grounds include historic botany beds and woods and ponds which are open to the public from time to time and are regularly used as an educational aid by local primary schools – our Environmental/Botany Gardens Manager hosts these events and provides materials for the schools.  We have now joined the Forest Schools Scheme.

Each year many of our sixth form undertake the Community Sports Leader Award, helping with PE in local primary schools and organising tournaments.

We run an adult choir for the local community and a community orchestra.

JAGS is regularly used as a venue for regional training events for teachers.

JAGS pupils worked with a neighbouring primary school to redesign, build and paint their playground area to make it more pupil-friendly.

Since 1993 we have run the James Allen’s Saturday School for the Performing Arts (JASSPA), which attracts 450 pupils aged 3-18 from over 50 local state schools to learn musical instruments, sing, dance, act and hear story-tellers.  An offshoot of this is the JYT - a youth theatre for local young people which performs shows in our theatre each year. This is linked to local Gifted & Talented schemes.

Since 1997 we have run a Saturday Literacy Scheme for some 48 Year 3 children from 11 Southwark Primary Schools, under the auspices of the Southwark Community Education Council.  We provide the premises free of charge plus an individual mentor for each student (5 well-qualified literacy tutors are employed by SCEC to lead the scheme). 

In Autumn 2003 JAGS Headmistress co-founded the Southwark Schools' Learning Partnership with a local state school Head linking 3 independent and 6 state secondary schools in Southwark. It has involved hundreds of teachers and pupils from all the schools in a range of activities to improve learning and teaching and to share expertise and fresh ideas, including learning enquiries, student voice, joint concerts, plays and sports and working together in many curriculum areas.

We are undertaking a new ISSP project with 3 state secondary partners to increase levels of participation and achievement in science and MFL in Southwark.

We have a long-standing partnership with a local Special School and our pupils undertake a two week summer project there each July.  They also come to us for activities such as pond-dipping.

We have provided training sessions on electronic UCAS and university admissions procedures for sixth form advisers from local state schools.

Our Head of Classics is currently teaching a twilight GCSE Latin group at a local state school as their teacher left the school in the middle of the course.

Currently a Year 12 pupil from a neighbouring state school is studying A level music at JAGS (free of charge) as it was not offered at his school; he also plays in our main orchestra, rehearsing weekly - as does another pupil from that school, in order to be able to play with musicians of an equivalent standard.

We are currently running a Latin-American project for Year 9 pupils with local state schools, organized by our Head of Spanish with support from Southwark.

Whenever we host conferences or visiting lecturers or theatre groups we invite pupils and staff from other local schools and they reciprocate. 

We also have a large number of links and partnerships with overseas schools and projects such as: 6^th form students working annually with local students to run summer schools for children with special needs in Romania; supporting the building of a primary school and community centre in Malawi by a recent JAGS leaver; linking with a school in Grenada where a JAGS maths teacher worked for a year; linking with a Sri Lankan school post-tsunami; helping to fund a school in Tanzania where an ex-JAGS pupil works; supporting a centre for street children and adolescent mothers in Peru, founded by our recent ex-Head of Spanish.