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Draft:Christopher Potter (headmaster)

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Christopher Potter
OBE
Born
Christopher Frank Rendall Potter

9 September 1939
Worcester, England
Died2023 (aged 83)
Alma materTrinity College, Cambridge
OccupationsSchoolmaster and headmaster
Known forHeadmaster of Old Swinford Hospital (1978–2001); early teaching of A-level archaeology
SpouseCharlotte Millis (m. 1971)
Children5
RelativesTimothy W. Potter (brother)

Christopher Frank Rendall Potter OBE (9 September 1939 – 2023) was an English schoolmaster who served for twenty-three years as headmaster of Old Swinford Hospital, the seventeenth-century state boarding school in Stourbridge, from 1978 until 2001.[1][2][3] Under his leadership the school recovered from a long decline, became one of the first grant-maintained schools in England in 1989, and by the mid-1990s was repeatedly placed at or near the top of the national examination league tables for non-selective schools, being ranked the best-performing comprehensive in the country in successive years.[4][5][6][7] Earlier in his career, as a classics master at Ardingly College, Potter had been among the first schoolmasters in Britain to teach archaeology at A-level, and his pupils included several future professional archaeologists. He was appointed OBE for services to education at the end of his career.[2][8][3]

Early life and family

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Potter was born in Worcester in 1939, the eldest of three children, into a family of schoolmasters: his grandfather had been headmaster of the John Roan School in Blackheath, and his father, Cedric Hardcastle Potter, became headmaster of March Grammar School in Cambridgeshire.[2][9] His mother, Phyllis (née Rendall), was the daughter of a founding manager of the Eagle Oil and Shipping Company.[2]

Potter was educated at March Grammar School and read classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was supervised for the Roman Britain paper of the tripos by Jocelyn Toynbee.[2][8] His interest in Roman Britain began in boyhood: at weekends he and his younger brother Timothy field-walked the ploughed Fenland fields around March in search of Samian ware, and in 1954 the brothers were present at the discovery of the Roman site at Flaggrass, speaking about the find on local radio.[2][8] As students the brothers excavated together at Grandford and Flaggrass in the Fens, an excavation they later jointly published.[8][1] Timothy Potter became a noted Roman archaeologist and Keeper of Prehistoric and Romano-British Antiquities at the British Museum.[9]

Ardingly College

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In 1961 Potter was appointed to teach Latin and Greek at Ardingly College in West Sussex, where he was head of classics from 1964 and a housemaster from 1966 until his departure in 1978.[8][3][1] In 1963, at the request of two sixth-formers, he began teaching archaeology A-level alongside his timetable — by his own account knowing little of the syllabus and learning as he went — and Ardingly thereby became, according to British Archaeology, the first school in the country to have archaeology on the timetable.[2][8] From 1976 to 1980 he was chief examiner in archaeology for the London Examinations Board, setting the syllabus and papers, and he served as secretary of the schools section of the Council for British Archaeology; he also taught archaeology summer schools for the University of London's extra-mural department.[2][8][1] He took pupils on excavations at the school's own sites and on digs in the Fens, and as a Cambridge undergraduate had himself mounted a 1959 expedition retracing the route of Xerxes's invasion of Greece in an ex-army ambulance, with support from National Geographic and ITV.[8]

His teaching directed an unusual number of pupils towards careers in professional archaeology: his Ardingly A-level pupils included Sue Hamilton, later professor of prehistory and director of the UCL Institute of Archaeology; Robert Foley, later professor of human evolution at Cambridge; the Levantine prehistorian Nigel Goring-Morris; and Mike Pitts, later editor of British Archaeology.[2][8] The boys in his house included the future Private Eye editor Ian Hislop, who, encountering Potter decades later as the local historian in the BBC Radio 4 series Looking for Middle England, recognised on air his "old housemaster".[10]

Old Swinford Hospital

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Rebuilding the school

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Potter was appointed headmaster of Old Swinford Hospital, the boys' boarding school founded by Thomas Foley in 1667, taking up the post in September 1978.[11] The school he inherited was, in his own later description, "empty", and his first priority was the recruitment of pupils and staff.[2] Within months he was setting out plans to grow the roll, then about 340 boys taught by 25 masters, to around 500, presenting the school — a voluntary-aided foundation whose tuition was funded by Dudley education authority while parents paid only boarding fees — as a "necessary" link between state and private education.[11] He also brought his archaeological enthusiasms with him, introducing archaeology at A-level at the school soon after his arrival.[11]

The boarding side, which Potter made his particular priority, grew steadily: the number of boarders rose fourfold over his tenure, and four new boarding houses — Foley (1982), Witley (1983), Dudley (1984) and Baxter (1990) — were built to accommodate them.[2][12] By 1993 the school had 380 boarders in a total roll of 570 and was extending its sixth-form house to cope with demand; it was interviewing five boys for every boarding place available at thirteen.[13]

Grant-maintained status

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In September 1989 Old Swinford Hospital became one of the first schools in England to be granted grant-maintained status under the Education Reform Act 1988, opting out of local-authority control in favour of direct funding from central government.[4][12] The conversion was immediately contentious: Dudley education officials protested to the government that the school's budget had risen by £160,000 to more than £1 million, a settlement the authority's chief education officer suggested might be unlawful; Potter responded that the apparent increase merely represented the school's share of money previously absorbed by central administration, which the school now saw directly and could decide how to spend.[4]

Potter became a prominent advocate of the grant-maintained model and of state boarding generally. He attributed part of the school's later examination success to the financial autonomy of grant-maintained status, which he said had allowed administrative costs to be cut and resources redirected to the classroom, keeping average class sizes below the sixth form at twenty.[6] By the mid-1990s he was being quoted in the national press as an authority on the recovery of state boarding and on the movement of middle-class parents back into the maintained sector.[13][14] He served as chairman of the State Boarding Information Service from 1996 to 1998.[1][3]

League-table success

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The school's examination results rose steadily through the 1980s and 1990s. It recorded its first Cambridge admission in 1983.[2] In 1991 a Sunday Times A-level survey placed it eighteenth in the country and the highest-placed school in the Midlands, with an overall pass rate of 93 per cent against a national average of 78.[15] After record GCSE results in 1992,[16] the school was ranked first equal in the country at GCSE in the government's 1995 performance tables,[5] and in 1996 its GCSE performance was bettered by only one other comprehensive in England, a result that made the front page of The Birmingham Post.[6] In 1997 The Daily Telegraph reported the school at the head of the comprehensive tables under the headline "State boarding school tops class", with Potter — then nineteen years into his headship — describing his aim as combining the ethos of the hard-working grammar school with the best aspects of independent boarding at an affordable price.[17] In 1998 the school topped the government's GCSE tables for the second year running, with 98 per cent of pupils gaining five or more A*–C grades — the best pass rate in the country — and was named first in the national top ten; Potter argued that the round-the-clock support of a boarding school, and the aim of producing well-rounded rather than hothoused pupils, lay behind results that exceeded those of many grammar schools despite the school's non-selective intake.[18][7]

The success was achieved despite ageing accommodation: a 1993 Ofsted inspection condemned parts of the school's seventeenth-century teaching block as cramped, badly heated and poorly lit, even as it commended the pupils' behaviour and the standards of teaching; the governors used the report to press the Department for Education for a new teaching block, and Potter declared himself delighted with the inspectors' overall findings.[19]

Retirement

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Potter announced his retirement early in 2001, reflecting that the most satisfying aspect of his career had been seeing pupils fulfil their talents; he was appointed OBE around the same time, describing the award as "a reflection of what has been achieved at the school".[3][2] He spent his final week in July 2001 back in the classroom where he had begun, was given what he called an unsurpassable send-off by staff and pupils, and a Chris Potter scholarship was established at the school to support less well-off boys.[20][21] On his retirement the former Chief Inspector of Schools Chris Woodhead devoted a full-page Daily Telegraph profile to Potter and the school, reporting a roll of 535 boys — the largest in its history — boarding fees of £6,000 a year, eight Oxbridge places the previous year, and growing applications from disadvantaged families in south London; Woodhead wrote that Potter knew "boys who were languishing in ordinary comprehensives have flourished in this more structured environment", and suggested the government appoint him to the National College for School Leadership so that his common sense might benefit the next generation of heads.[21] He was succeeded as headmaster by Melvyn Roffe, previously deputy head of Monmouth School.[3] A boarding house at Old Swinford Hospital is named Potter House in his honour.[12]

Later life

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Potter married Charlotte Ann Millis, of San Francisco, in 1971; they had two sons and three daughters.[2][1] In retirement the couple divided their time between Ludlow, Shropshire, and Crete, where they had a property overlooking Souda Bay.[2] He had long combined headship with school governance and antiquarian interests. He was a governor of The Elms School, Colwall, from 1984 to 2013, latterly as chairman of the governors;[22] chairman of the trustees of the Knoll School, Kidderminster, from 1989 to 2008;[1][22] and president of the Stourbridge Archaeological and Historical Society from 1988.[1] He held a Schoolmaster Studentship at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1989–90, studying Tudor muster rolls; edited parish register transcripts for the Worcestershire parishes of Romsley and Stone; and read sixteenth-century church court records for pleasure.[2][3][1] On retiring he planned to write a history of Old Swinford Hospital, which he had been researching since his arrival.[3] He continued this archival work with Shropshire Archives in Shrewsbury, and made two BBC appearances in 2010: in the radio programme in which his former Ardingly pupil Ian Hislop rediscovered him,[10] and in a BBC One episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, guiding the presenter Alexander Armstrong through records of his landed-gentry ancestors.[23][24] With the Ludlow historian David Lloyd and Margaret Clark he co-wrote a history of St Laurence's Church, Ludlow, the town's parish church, published in 2010.[25] He died in 2023, aged 83.[2]

Publications

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Potter's publications include:[1]

  • (with T. W. Potter) A Romano-British Village at Grandford, Cambridgeshire (1980)
  • (ed.) Parish Register Transcripts: Romsley, Worcestershire (1988)
  • (ed.) Parish Register Transcripts: Stone, Worcestershire (1989)
  • (with David Lloyd and Margaret Clark) St Laurence's Church, Ludlow: The Parish Church and People, 1199–2009 (Logaston Press, 2010) ISBN 978-1-906663-40-7[25]

References

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  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 "Potter, Christopher Frank Rendall". Who's Who 2000. London: A & C Black. 2000. p. 1643.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 "Christopher Potter, 83: Enthusiastic headmaster who taught archaeology". The Times. 7 October 2023.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "School's out for top head". Stourbridge News and County Express. 15 February 2001. p. 11.
  4. 1 2 3 Hilton, Sally (14 October 1989). "Opt-out school in cash row". Birmingham Evening Mail. p. 12.
  5. 1 2 Harrison, Stephen (21 November 1995). "City schools lead the way with second year of A-level success". The Birmingham Post. p. 17.
  6. 1 2 3 Harrison, Stephen (20 November 1996). "Examination successes and shame of West Midland schools". The Birmingham Post. p. 1.
  7. 1 2 Lepkowska, Dorothy (1 December 1998). "School's top marks". The Express. p. 4.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Pitts, Mike (May–June 2023). "My archaeology: Toasting the ancient Brits". British Archaeology. No. 190. pp. 48–49. Interview with Christopher Potter.
  9. 1 2 "Timothy Potter". The Daily Telegraph (Obituary). 26 January 2000. p. 27.
  10. 1 2 "Castles". Looking for Middle England. Episode 1. 2010. 24 minutes in. BBC Radio 4. Presented by Ian Hislop; Potter appears at approximately 24 minutes.
  11. 1 2 3 Barker, Christine (24 March 1979). "Tom Foley's schooldays". Birmingham Evening Mail. p. 11.
  12. 1 2 3 "About Old Swinford Hospital". Old Swinford Hospital. Retrieved 12 June 2026.
  13. 1 2 Tytler, David (29 June 1993). "Boarding schools: pupil numbers are rising in state boarding schools while independent sector numbers are falling". The Guardian. p. 63.
  14. ↑ Petre, Jonathan (24 April 1994). "Mix and match pupils have best of both worlds". The Sunday Telegraph. p. 10.
  15. ↑ "Local schools are top of the class". Stourbridge News. 12 September 1991. p. 20.
  16. ↑ Lepkowska, Dorothy (28 August 1992). "Swot a lot they've got as result of hard work". The Birmingham Post. p. 7.
  17. ↑ Weaver, Maurice (18 November 1997). "Boarding 'delivers the whole man'". The Daily Telegraph. p. 37.
  18. ↑ "Boys on top – again". Dudley Chronicle. 11 December 1998. p. 7.
  19. ↑ Lepkowska, Dorothy (30 December 1993). "Top school's buildings under fire". The Birmingham Post. p. 5.
  20. ↑ "Head's farewell after 23 years". Express & Star. 30 July 2001. p. 27.
  21. 1 2 Woodhead, Chris (18 August 2001). "'This place can transform lives'". Weekend. The Daily Telegraph. p. 34.
  22. 1 2 "Christopher Frank Rendall Potter: personal appointments". Companies House. Retrieved 12 June 2026.
  23. ↑ Roberts, Russell (24 August 2010). "Comedian Alexander Armstrong finds Shropshire links". Shropshire Star.
  24. ↑ "Alexander Armstrong". Who Do You Think You Are?. Series 7. 23 August 2010. BBC. BBC One.
  25. 1 2 Lloyd, David; Clark, Margaret; Potter, Chris (2010). St Laurence's Church, Ludlow: The Parish Church and People, 1199–2009. Almeley, Herefordshire: Logaston Press. ISBN 978-1-906663-40-7.

Category:1939 births Category:2023 deaths Category:Heads of schools in England Category:English schoolteachers Category:Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Category:People from Worcester, England Category:Officers of the Order of the British Empire

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