The co-curricular life of Emanuel School

At Emanuel, we believe that a good education extends beyond the boundaries of the classroom.

Our pupils have a wealth of clubs and societies to explore during their free

time – over 50, in fact – with a wide range of activities

taking place every lunchtime and after school.

SPORTSport is highly valued and an important part of our culture providing the opportunity for mass participation and the pursuit of sporting excellence. We aim to help pupils learn to cope with success and failure, to understand and appreciate others, and to encourage the appreciation of fair play. Each week every pupil participates in a 70 minute games session and further provision is offered during extra-curricular time before school, lunch times, after school and weekends.

At Emanuel, we offer 22 different sports and physical activities; however, we have chosen to put most of our resources into five sports, with the aim of achieving both wide participation and excellence at an elite level. Sports are categorised as core or

additional sports and both play competitive fixtures against other schools. Core sports enjoy greater financial support for equipment and professional coaches. As pupils progress through the school the breadth of sports available to them increases.

There are a number of training camps and tours that run over the course of the year. Recently the school has run a netball tour to Barbados, a senior rugby tour to France, a cricket tour to Sri Lanka, and boys and girls rowing training camps to Italy. The scheduled tours and training camps are very popular and have become an important part of the programme.

Boys Girls

Core sports

Rugby (autumn term)

Rowing (spring term)

Football (spring term)

Cricket (summer term)

Netball (autumn term)

Hockey (spring term)

Rowing (summer term)

Additional sports

Athletics (summer term)

Cross country (autumn and spring

term)

Fives (autumn and spring term)

Swimming (all terms)

Athletics (summer term)

Cross country (autumn and spring term)

Cricket (summer term)

Fives (autumn and spring term)

Swimming (all terms)

MUSICThe school has a very strong musical tradition and is very popular at Emanuel with large numbers of pupils involved in a wide variety of activities. We organise rock bands, chamber ensembles, an annual musical in co-operation with the Drama department, jazz ensembles, guitar groups and percussion groups as well as the traditional ensembles such as chapel choir and orchestra. The House music competition is very popular, with around 250 participants in a variety of classes. Approximately 350 individual music lessons per week take place in school (including DJ-ing from January 2020), and there are over 35 ensembles and choirs in the weekly schedule.

We aim to stretch and challenge the elite musicians in the school. We have around 25 music scholars in the school at any one time, and there are many others who perform and play at a very high standard. A team of 22 first-rate visiting professional music teachers deliver extra music lessons in and around the normal curriculum.

Emanuel also has a long tradition of delivering high-quality music. There are chapel services in school every day and the chapel choir also regularly performs evensong in cathedrals around the country including St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey.

There are two ambitious carol services held near Christmas. At least one large-scale choral performances is held annually with the choir augmented by the parents’ choir. This academic year we are putting on a ‘Last Night at the Proms’ with professional soloists and orchestra.

There is an annual music tour, normally held in the early part of the summer holiday. In recent years the Choir has toured to Prague, Poland and Malta. A tour to Paris is planned for Summer 2020.

DRAMAThe Drama department is busy and vibrant, with a focus on excellent skills-based teaching as well as an exciting programme of public performances, trips and theatre visits.

The department focuses much attention on the creation of ambitious public performances and we are fortunate to have a variety of performance spaces around the school, as well as a dedicated technical team. There is a senior or junior play in alternate years. In addition, a Year 7 play, Hill form (Year 6) play and whole school musicals occur annually, with additional ‘Play in a Week’, and student directed work such as the ‘ETC Project’ in which lower sixth students direct Year 10 students in a short play.

The Edinburgh Project (typically involving 20+ students) runs every other year and we usually take two plays up to be performed at the festival – these performances have all been sold-out for the past three trips. We are keen that students have the opportunity to access contemporary and classical theatre as part of the co-curricular work of the department.

The department is housed in the Fiennes Theatre, a fully equipped, purpose-built performance space, holding 118 (retractable seating for versatile use of the space) with a smaller teaching studio attached. A new film/TV studio was opened in 2017 which the department has use of. Larger productions take place in the Hampden Hall (which seats up to 500).

ARTArt and Design at Emanuel is exciting and inspiring, housed in the Dacre building – a modern, innovative centre for the creative arts, opened in autumn 2017.

The building is equipped with specialist paint and print studios, a dark room for photography, a ceramics room with dedicated kiln and glazing rooms and a sculpture studio. Pupils are able to study with a range of equipment, including colour laser printers, Promethean boards and the latest Adobe software.

We believe that artistic development helps to fulfil pupils’ individuality and aesthetic appreciation. A great emphasis is placed on the importance of visual research and pupils’ ability to make connections with their own practice and the work of artists and craftspeople.

There are plenty of extra-curricular opportunities for budding artists to enjoy. A level students are

invited to drawing masterclasses, which help prepare many students for interview and admission to prestigious art colleges. Some of our trips have included the Turner Contemporary at Margate; Tate St Ives, Cornwall; tours of the Tate Modern and Venice.

Exhibitions are numerous, with displays of all pupil artwork at school events as well as our sixth form work being displayed at prestigious London galleries in an exhibition with other schools in the United Westminster and Grey Coat Foundation. Emanuel students gain places at some of the nation’s best art colleges, including The Royal Drawing School, Central St Martins, Kingston University, Ravensbourne, the University for the Arts: Epsom and CCW (Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon combined Foundation Course), as well as degree courses such as architecture at UCL, Newcastle and Manchester.

CLUBS & ACTIVITIESThe most popular co-curricular activity is, by far, the Duke of Edinburgh Award, with over 100 pupils enrolling in this national programme each year. Other popular activities include Media Club, Bouldering Club, Costume-Making Club, Dr Who Club and Junior Equality Club – the latter of which was set up by a group of Year 6 pupils in 2018. It is our hope that our pupils will be able to look back on their days at Emanuel, safe in the knowledge that they made the most of the many opportunities on offer. We find that by adopting a ‘have a go’ attitude, pupils will learn a great deal, enjoy themselves and make some strong and lasting friendships along the way.

We take innovation and enterprise very seriously at Emanuel and pupils are given plenty of opportunity to get their entrepreneurial juices flowing at various stages throughout their time at the school. In fact, the school has taken a pioneering step in this area and has implemented a ‘Dragons’ Den’ style competition amongst the local primary schools that our staff help with and host each year. In the sixth form, students are encouraged to take part in the Europe-wide Young Enterprise competition. Starting at very local level, teams are eliminated through a

series of rounds, competing with approximately 950 UK schools each year. Emanuel has a good record and has been within one round of the national finals for the last two years. Only 14 schools get to the national finals, so we are hopefully on the cusp of something great!

The Industry Champions programme also runs throughout the lower sixth. Students are put in groups with a business mentor from the parent body or from our alumni, who are always more than willing to help. This culminates in the ‘Entrepreneur and You’ event in June.

There are a host of other exciting enterprising activities that pupils can get involved in throughout their school careers. These include lectures, speakers, essay competitions and even the chance to join the Digital Music Club. This an area that is constantly evolving and different ideas and initiatives get tried and tested all of the time. Pupils are encouraged to be innovative and entrepreneurial and they are always welcome to suggest ways that we can increase and improve our offering in this area.

TRIPSLearning through experiences outside the classroom is a key element of the overall educational ethos of Emanuel.

School trips are powerful, positive teaching tools that help enhance the social, personal and emotional development of all pupils and teachers. We are very fortunate to be supported by our staff who give their time to run trips and visits during and after school as well as within the holidays, so that there is always something new to see or somewhere new to go.

Every year we run a selection of trips, ranging from afternoon visits to local places of worship to sports tours half way around the world and everywhere in between. Some of these trips are designed to directly support work done in the classroom, for example conferences and lectures in subjects such as Geography, History, Mathematics, Classics and Biology, whilst others, such as visits to partnership schools, aim to develop character traits such as independence, resilience and teamwork and help broaden pupil perspectives.

Regular trips that take place are team-building days at the start of the year for pupils in Years 6, 7 and the lower sixth. There are also ‘bushcraft’ overnight adventures for pupils in both Year 6 and 8 towards the end of the school year, whilst Year 7 have a water-based activity adventure to round off their school year. Sporting tours happen on rotation and popular venues are Barbados for netball, Spain for hockey and France, and South Africa and Italy for rugby. The rowing club run an annual training camp at Easter on Lake Varese in northern Italy.

Pupils do travel much further afield as well. Every summer pupils from the lower sixth spend three weeks of their holiday at one of our partnership schools in Tamil Nadu, India where they teach English and enrichment activities. In October 2019, pupils in Year 11 visited The Gambia – a unique opportunity in which they learnt about global issues affecting this fascinating country as well as volunteering alongside young Gambian people, creating a lasting positive impact in the local community.

Battersea Rise, London SW11 1HS

www.emanuel.org.uk