Woodland Art combines creative art activities with outdoor learning in a woodland setting. It offers our boys a unique opportunity to explore creativity while engaging directly with nature, observing textures, colours, sounds, and seasonal changes to inform their artistic expression.

Admittedly I was a newcomer to Oxford. My family and I had moved from the windswept fields and wide skies of East Anglia, and before that I had lived further afield, in France and Switzerland. Star struck perhaps with Oxford’s beauty, I also knew very little about the city and its rich and varied history.

We are very fortunate to have a dedicated space for our prep pupils to start their journey as young scientists; this allows numerous opportunities for collaborative, investigative tasks that would not be possible in other settings.

I have always been a fan of the stars of early cinema. They took a brand-new technology and used it to combine what they knew already (in many cases, clowning) with new ideas, creating a whole new genre of creativity. Of course, for the first generation of cinema actors, it was not possible to synchronise pictures with sound – but if you watch their films you really don’t need it. They developed a method of acting in which they communicated everything they wanted to say through tight plotting, gestures and some wonderful facial expressions. There was also the new, and related, profession of being a cinema pianist or organist, who had to improvise music to accompany the film, often with added sound effects (literal “bells and whistles”) stuck to the top of the organ. Some silent movie stars stopped work in the 1930s, when sound arrived, but others kept going – and I love that even into the 1940s, Laurel and Hardy movies don’t really need the dialogue.