Academic
Academic standards are high: 93% of GCSE students attain A*-C grades; there is a 100% pass rate at A-Level; and 100% of A-Level leavers take up places at universities (10% to Oxbridge) or on gap year schemes. The school's most recent inspection rated much of the education and pastoral provision as 'outstanding'.
Ten GCSEs are usually taken by each pupil, consisting of five compulsory subjects (Religious Studies, Mathematics, English Language and Literature, and a modern language (French, German or Spanish) plus Information Technology and Personal, Social Education, with five other options from humanities, sciences, or arts subjects. In Poetry (lower sixth), four or five AS-Levels are taken from a choice of 25 subjects, with a weekly Theology class. One of these may be dropped and the remainder, or all, taken on to A-Level. Six A* - C grades are the requirement for Sixth Form entry. Each academic department has dedicated teaching rooms around the school, in addition to the general classrooms and playroom study places.
Education during the college's early history was based on St Ignatius' Ratio Studiorum, with emphasis upon theology, classics and science, all of which still feature prominently in the curriculum. The educational practice, observed at the College of St Omer, of dividing a class into Romans and Carthaginians continued long after the migration to Stonyhurst but is not employed today; each pupil would be pitched against an opponent with the task of picking up on the other's mistakes in an attempt to score points.
Until Roman Catholics were admitted to Oxbridge in 1894, Stonyhurst was also home to "philosopher gentlemen" studying BA courses under the London Matriculation Examination system. Their numbers began to fall after 1894 and the department was closed in 1916.
Read more about this topic: Stonyhurst College
Famous quotes containing the word academic:
“The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
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—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)
“If we focus exclusively on teaching our children to read, write, spell, and count in their first years of life, we turn our homes into extensions of school and turn bringing up a child into an exercise in curriculum development. We should be parents first and teachers of academic skills second.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)