There are many reasons why is a great pleasure to be here with you today but I only have time to mention a few of them. Never have a given a speech where I felt such pressure to keep to time. I will make sure that you get your train home. When I was here the special train for London left at about 7.15 in the morning so there was no question of trying to squeeze in a prize-giving before everyone headed for home.
But I am immensely proud to be an Old Blue so it is a great privilege to be invited back to this quick prize-giving ceremony. Four years after leaving CH I went to the University of Paris to study and then on to the University of Montreal in Canada for my first job. All in all I spent 25 overseas, which made it quite hard to stay in touch with the School and very difficult to come back and visit.
Since I returned to the UK nine years ago as Vice-Chancellor of the Open University I’ve had a different problem. Most of our 25 OU degree ceremonies take place on summer Saturdays and this has prevented me from coming to special events here.
I enjoy officiating at our degree ceremonies. I try to have a brief word with each graduate, which means that each year at least 5,000 graduates tell me what OU study has meant to them. They and their families are very proud of their achievements. We should always try to recognise achievement and I am delighted to celebrate your success today.
I have a special admiration for prize-winners here at CH because when I was here I didn’t win any prizes until my last year. I think there must have been more prizes available for grecians in their last year – perhaps there still are. There is a nice little story behind one of the prizes that I won, and I’ll come back to that in a minute.
As well as congratulating today’s prizewinners I’d like to congratulate all of you for your academic successes in GCSE and A levels and also those who have obtained places at universities. I am delighted to see that pupils from CH are going on to a wide variety of universities.
Perhaps some of you who are going to university next year are already impatient to be off. My advice would be not to be in any great hurry. I was at Oxford University in the 1960s with quite a large group of people from CH. What surprised us most was that we found much in our studies at Oxford to be less intellectually stimulating and exciting than our last year here.
That was partly because of the very specialised nature of university study in those days – in contrast to the wide range of interests we had pursued here once the pressure of university entrance was over. But it was also because of the tremendous quality of the CH teaching staff, who took a real pleasure in helping us broaden our horizons and explore new topics.
So don’t assume that everything at university is tremendously sophisticated compared to being at CH. You’ll enjoy university but the chances are that you will never again have such a wide general knowledge as you do now, nor such great opportunities to dabble in a range of extra-curricular activities. Obviously, I’m not encouraging you to stay here for ever, but don’t be in too much of a hurry to kick over the traces.
I recall that one of the prizes I won in my last year was for voluntary work in the art school. For this prize I chose to receive James Joyce’s Ulysees. I chose that title because I had been told that I won my scholarship to Oxford to study science partly on the basis of a general paper that I had written about James Joyce and Ulysees. I thought I should honour Joyce’s memory by at least having a copy of his book.
My choice of book was brought to the attention of the Headmaster, Clarence Seaman, who, although he was quite happy for me to have the book, thought that it wasn’t appropriate for such a risqué book to be on the table at prizegiving. So I received Ulysees behind the scenes, so to speak.
I wonder whether that would happen today – but I shall not ask if there are any of you getting your prizes off stage and, if so, what they are.
I have suggested that it is only after you leave CH that you begin to realise what a very special place it is. I feel doubly privileged in that I have been associated, for much of my working life, with an institution and a movement that are a modern parallel of Edward VI’s decision to create Christ’s Hospital. He did so in order to give a better chance in life to the orphans and other poor children of the City of London.
The modern parallel that I refer to is the Open University. I also call it a movement because no British educational initiative in living memory has been so widely copied around the world.
What are the parallels between CH and the OU? First, both began in an atmosphere of scepticism. I imagine there were plenty of people in 16th century London who thought that the money allocated to create CH could have been better spent on something else. Certainly most of the press and the educational establishment were deeply sceptical about the Open University, if not actually hostile. At the time one politician called the idea ‘blithering nonsense’.
Second, both CH and the OU have been very successful in opening up access to education to people whose families were not rich but who had the energy and the talent to achieve great things. At CH you see the evidence all around you, not least in the willingness of so many who have benefited from the school to support it as Donation Governors or in other ways.
The record of the Open University is also impressive. This year there are 160,000 people studying for degrees in the OU. Yet in the idea that the idea of the OU was launched there were only 130,000 students in all universities combined. And these 160,000 students are a very diverse group of people. All ages, all races, 50/50 men and women, 6,000 with a disability one kind or another, 25,000 of them overseas.
Third, both CH and the OU have achieved excellent reputations for their academic achievements. CH has established itself as one of Britain’s leading schools over four and a half centuries. In only thirty years the Open University has risen to a place in the elite group of universities that have most of their teaching programmes rated as excellent. I expect that next year the OU will be ranked in the top ten among the UK’s hundred universities for the quality of its teaching.
There is also research of international calibre going on in each of its faculties. It was an OU academic who startled the world, two months ago, by detecting tenth planet in our solar system. Another OU academic is sending a lander to Mars in 2003 to find out whether there is life there – I keep my fingers crossed that this British project will have more luck than the recent American efforts to study Mars. At least, as good Europeans, we are not likely to confuse metres and yards.
I attribute the success of CH and the success of the OU to similar causes. In both cases they attract good and motivated students who are eager to take advantage of an opportunity they would not otherwise have had.
In both cases the staff are motivated by the idealism that is built into the institution. In the case of CH it is the privilege of serving children of familes in social, financial, or other particular need. For the OU it is the mission of being open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods and open as to ideas.
Christ’s Hospital has given you great benefits – which you will appreciate more fully as you advance in life. Some of you are now going on to other universities, which is fine because the OU makes no attempt to recruit school leavers – although increasing numbers are coming to us anyway.
But the OU is there for all of you for the rest of your lives. The government is now promoting an agenda of lifelong learning for everyone. Even before it did so I suspect most people coming out of Christ’s Hospital had acquired a love of learning that made them lifelong learners anyway.
So I commend the Open University to you as the university for the rest of your lives. You will find an institution whose ideals practices are very congenial to the culture that you have acquired here at CH.
May I congratulate you all again, may I commend the staff for the excellent climate of learning and caring that they foster, and may I thank you for letting me share this celebration of success with you. Have a good trip home and a wonderful millennium Christmas.