Re-accreditation as a World Class School

On 6th December, the education accreditation charity World Class Schools Quality Mark (WCSQM) held its biggest Awards Ceremony to date, at the prestigious Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. After a year’s hiatus the charity, which includes over 120 of the highest achieving non-selective state schools in its network, celebrated the opportunity to bring school leaders and students back together at the world-leading centre of learning – the historic ceremonial hall of Oxford University.

The highlights of this year’s ceremony, sponsored by the world-leading video learning resource platform ClickView, included a keynote address from Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, author of Becoming Dickens and newly published The Turning Point, and an audience with Dan Freedman, author of the best-selling Jamie Johnson series, and inspirational school speaker. Dan judged, and awarded the winner of, this year’s WCSQM essay writing competition, and gave away signed copies of his book to the writers of the students shortlisted for this year’s prize.

“We’re delighted to be able to come back together safely with our schools, and to be working with Oxford University’s outreach team to showcase the many outstanding educational opportunities available at Oxford for non-selective state students, regardless of their background. By celebrating the World Class characteristics of our students in this centre of academic excellence we hope to motivate them to go on and achieve their World Class potential.” Miranda Perry, Director, WCSQM

The WCSQM Awards Ceremony celebrated the World Class accreditation and re-accreditation of schools UK wide whose students have undertaken a challenging assessment process in a bid to prove their school is World Class. WCSQM accreditation uses its framework of World Class student characteristics as a benchmark for an assessment process that assesses the characteristics of the individual student across a range of areas including learning, leadership, community and the workplace. The development of these characteristics support students to thrive in an ever changing global economy, and the uniqueness of WCSQM accreditation is its student-centred approach – the charity believes a school can only be considered World Class if its students can demonstrate World Class characteristics.

Ten of our year 13 ‘World Class Ambassador’ students travelled to Oxford to represent Weatherhead High School at this prestigious event. Sanjita, Emma, Libby, Miki, Izzy, Polly, Jess, Claire, Aimee and Tyler worked hard throughout 2021 to enable our school to be re-accredited as a World Class School as they each proved that they were ‘World Class’ in one of the ‘World Class student characteristics’. As well as achieving our re-accreditation we also celebrated Polly becoming a ‘World Class Assessor’, she now has to look at other schools and whether they have achieved the ‘World Class characteristics’. Weatherhead High School was also nominated by ‘World Class Schools’ and was one of 7 ‘World Class Schools’ across the country to be shortlisted for ‘World Class School’ of the year. Our ambassadors in year 13 have now registered and are part of the ‘World Class Schools’ alumni, so I am sure you are in agreement that they are destined for excellence in the future. The students attended an ‘Oxplore’ seminar whilst visiting Oxford University, in this session students were asked to generate some ‘big questions’ that would promote discussion, Libby and Izzy were runners up in this competition with their entry ‘Could modern civilisation cope without money?’