An Old Oundelian (OO) and lifelong Oundle resident discusses the importance of community at Oundle School.
What do you associate with British boarding schools? Maybe you reach for tropes of popular fiction, in which case, you might imagine schools of witchcraft and wizardry, located on barren lochs in far-flung enclaves of British wilderness. This popular imagery figures such schools as guarded and as possessing their own eccentric cultures, inaccessible to those that reside outside the castle walls. When it comes to Oundle School, my experience is the very opposite.
Part of the magic of Oundle School life comes from the fact that the School is embedded in a real community and actively contributes to it. This is ever-evident in the geography of the School grounds. Forget misty moors and craggy cliffs – Oundle School’s campus is integrated across a dynamic municipality. An Oundelian’s walk from one lesson to another is uniquely permeated by the cultural culmination of centuries of life under a 972 AD market charter. However, as an Oundle School alum (OO) and lifelong Oundle resident, I can tell you that there is so much more to the relationship between School and town than mere geographical proximity.
This was brought home to me recently, as I was exercising in the Oundle School Sports Centre. The Sports Centre offers memberships to the public, a service that I have gladly made use of over the past few months. In this time, I have come to realise what a community hub this site is; I have seen the comings and goings of countless classes, fellow OOs, teachers, old friends and a broad demographic of Oundle residents including swimmers, runners, triathletes, body builders and those just wishing to keep fit – the variety is astounding. I also experienced the transition from holiday to term time as the pupils returned in September, with both School sporting commitments and access for members of the general public juggled seamlessly to serve everyone well.
There is an important point to this; the School’s community-facing posture within Oundle town allows Oundelians to be a part of something bigger than the School itself. By sharing spaces with the community and existing alongside and within the town, pupils are grounded in real life and reminded daily of and integrated in the world outside the classroom walls.
Daily routines within the wider community defined my time at Oundle School, as School life was constantly enriched by synergy between town and timetable. For example, break times present the Oundelian with a difficult question, one that is traditionally answered by one of the many local businesses in town: ‘what do I snack on today?’ Some pupils gravitate towards a packet of crisps or cookies from a nearby supermarket, some haunt the food trucks at the farmer’s market and some purchase buns from the local baker, whilst a bold pupil fills these buns with crisps to make a crisp sandwich. These are all good options, however, my break time snack of choice was the famed Trendalls Doughnut. Amongst the rows of meats and cheeses at Trendalls Butchers, there is a £0.50 gem of a baked good, filled with melted chocolate sauce. This doughnut draws a queue of dozens of pupils to the butcher everyday and was a mainstay feature of my break time at Oundle School.
The experience of shopping for oneself at break time was an amazingly instructive one. As a pupil, I gained a genuine sense of freedom in the knowledge that breaktime brought the opportunity to go out into town and decide the fate of my own hunger. The practice of this type of freedom helped prepare me in a small way for life at university, with the stabilisers of independence within a safe market town community providing a firm footing.
To give you another example of the School’s active approach to engaging with the community, look no further than Wednesday afternoon activities. Each Wednesday, Oundelians partake in community initiatives, generally falling under two categories, Combined Cadet Force (CCF) and Community Action (CA). The CCF are an integral part of town events such as the Remembrance Day Parade, in which they march through the centre of Oundle town to commemorate the lives of members of both the local and School community who served, fought and gave their lives during the War. This is a staple event of every annum but the CCF have also joined the town community in marking one-off occasions, such as the 80th VE Day earlier this year.
Community Action sees Oundelians building relationships with residents from all walks of life through community-facing activities. These activities include (but are not limited to) visiting the elderly, creating artwork with disabled members of the community and touring drama performances across various special needs schools. For my CA activities, I volunteered at the local primary school and later worked on the School magazine (The Oundelian) and School radio station (OSCAR). The time spent on The Oundelian and OSCAR put me in a position of representing the School in its pupil-led media output and developed my interest in Communications work, a field that I am now entering after my recent graduation from university. That said, there is far more to be reaped from CA than professional building blocks; by ensuring community facing activities are a fixture of school life, pupils learn the importance of social responsibility. Across these Wednesday afternoon activities, I really enjoyed regular interactions with the wider community and took seriously my responsibility to represent the School well and to add value.
So, while the fictional witches and wizards at the beginning of this piece go about their studies behind high walls, Oundelians look to break down these walls and use their schooling as an opportunity to be part of something bigger, a community. This outward-looking culture benefitted me academically, especially in my sense of place amongst a faculty at university, professionally, as in my choice of career field and socially, in my everyday interactions with friends, strangers and everyone in between. Now that I am no longer an Oundelian, yet still live in Oundle, I am sharing my spaces and resources with Oundelians, offering me the opposite perspective from the one I held at School. Even though the boot is now on the other foot, the community building tenets remain true for me.
