“Having bursary students in The Abbey absolutely enriches the school. I would love to help more girls than we currently are able to do.”
Liz is the Chair of Governors at The Abbey and an alumna
I ate a lot when I was at school. I remember we used to eat in something called ‘The Old Gym’, which was a kind of hut in the grounds, or in the dining room, depending on where we were allocated. The Old Gym was actually used for gym as well in the daytime, it was all very higgledy piggledy the way the school was set out. A great thing was the buns, sold by the tuck shop. The tuck shop consisted only of buns. These lovely sticky buns for a penny which you could queue up for and buy at break time. We had school milk then. Milk would arrive in little third of a pint bottles and they would often be frozen in the winter, so they would be sat on the radiator to kind of thaw out-horrors!
I was hopeless at games. We did hockey, tennis, netball and swimming. We were given ‘sports for life’ in the sixth form, and for reasons I don’t understand, I chose fencing. So, for two years, I learned how to fence. That was quite exciting because amazingly, we had a fencing teacher who was a man and we hadn’t had any male teachers up to that point.
The times in the field in summer were lovely. We’d do handstands and all kinds of stuff outside. Some of the teachers and lessons were fantastic. Miss Packer, who taught English, was wonderful. She had pleated skirts, blouses and cardigans and what she said was terrific- how to write an essay, how to put together a piece of prose, how to understand a play, how to analyse a novel. I always liked English lessons.
I do consider myself very, very lucky to have attended The Abbey.
At The Abbey I learnt to write well, which I think I can still do now. I’m good at solving problems, and I learnt that at The Abbey too. I also think I’m good at reading situations- working out what the best next step is to try and get a difficult situation forward, and understanding what people are saying, (the subtext). All the foundations for these skills were learnt at The Abbey, and I’ve carried them through my life.
I do consider myself very, very lucky to have attended The Abbey. The system was different then as I didn’t have a bursary but I had my fees paid by Reading Borough Council. There were a certain number of places paid for by the council. To get one of these places, you had to pass The Abbey entrance exam highly, and pass the 11+. My parents did have to pay for uniform from the uniform list and a hockey stick, but everything else was provided.
Advocate for Transformational Bursaries
One of the things that I really appreciated about The Abbey was how diverse the girls were in my class in terms of social economic diversity. There were a lot of us who were the first people in our families to go to university or receive higher education. There were several of my friends whose parents were blue collar workers, doing really manual work. My dad was a clerk working for Prudential and he called himself an administrative worker. My mum worked as a secretary.
We were kind of in the middle group. On the other end, there were people who belonged to families with a degree of significance, either locally or nationally. For instance, there was a girl in my year whose father had led the 1951 expedition that conquered Everest. What was super, was that all of us girls with very different backgrounds all mixed together. There wasn’t any sense of anyone being any better, worse or different than anybody else.
Something I do in my present role as Chair of Governors is help make decisions about bursaries. I would love to help more girls than we currently are able to do. We’ve spent a lot of money on bursaries and it would be wonderful to be able to spend more.
A bursary enables students to come to The Abbey to receive a terrific experience and do wonderfully well. There’s no distinction between girls who have bursaries and girls who don’t. I wouldn’t have been able to come to The Abbey if I hadn’t had the old equivalent of a bursary, what we used to call a free place. Several of my friends wouldn’t have been able to come either if they hadn’t had free places, demonstrating the importance of bursaries.
Having bursary students in The Abbey absolutely enriches the school. The more variety in the school community, the better. I want all the students to feel comfortable within the school community, regardless of their different backgrounds, and to know that they belong.
