Olivia and Thomas get set after being offered places at Oxford and Cambridge
Buckswood are celebrating this week after two of their brightest sparks have been offered places to study at Oxford and Cambridge universities. The hopeful candidates set off for interviews just before Christmas and have had an anxious few weeks wait to find out if they had been successful. The wait came to an end this week with both students being accepted at the UK’s top two universities.
Olivia Streeton from Hastings has been offered at place at Balliol College, Oxford to read Chinese. Olivia started learning Chinese in the Junior School when she joined Buckswood at the age of 11. “Studying at Buckswood alongside international students has really helped me, and Buckswood is a completely different environment to any other school. Other candidates at the Oxford interview had studied Chinese for a couple of years in groups of two or three, but at Buckswood Chinese runs through everyday life and is compulsory for everyone in the junior school so is almost second nature. We take part in the HSBC speaking competition, eat Chinese food every Tuesday, celebrate the New Year with music, dance and culture and so we learn so much more than vocabulary – it’s like a mini united nations.”
Olivia was able to talk at ease about modern and traditional Chinese literature and culture during her Oxford interview and agreed with the professor about the need for a greater depth of understanding that can be gained from studying both language, history and culture and how important the study of language is to international relations when she was asked “why study Chinese when everyone speaks English?”.
The interview process was a daunting one, with Olivia having to stay overnight in the city. Olivia thought that Oxford was really pretty saying, “I stayed in halls, ate in the Great Hall, had tours around Oxford and took part in some entertainment. Everyone was really welcoming and helpful.”
Cambridge was the destination for Thomas Bolton from St Leonards to attend an interview to read Mathematics at St Johns College. He said of the experience “ I had three interviews. The first was with a tutor and was about my personality. We clicked straight away as the majority of my education has been abroad and in international schools. The tutor was German, was married to a Polish man and had travelled a lot and really appreciated the value of internationalism.”
The following two interviews were about maths. Thomas felt that he was able to stay calm and organise his thoughts, “The 1:1 support I have had at Buckswood has really helped me approach problems from multiple angles and employ various strategies, and that was what I was being tested on in the interviews. The mock interviews at school really helped me, they really grilled me and it was a worst case scenario – the real thing wasn’t anything near as bad.”
“We are all so proud of all our Sixth Form Students” said Buckswood Headmaster Mr Giles Sutton “Sixth Form is were life gets serious for our students, we hand over the reins and challenge them to balance their professional and personal lives, organising themselves, their studies and activities such as the Christmas Ball, Business Fairs or our upcoming International Day”.
Buckswood Sixth Form has three pathways to university and all of the upper sixth have been busy for the last term working on their university applications and the offers have started to flood in. Buckswood IB programme has just been ranked 13th in the UK for small cohorts and has an average score equivalent to A*AA. The school’s Foundation programme is recognised at over 20 UK universities and is a gateway to the world of business and the A Level programme has a track record of A – C results at the top of the scale.
For more information about Buckswood School, their firs Open House event is this Saturday (21st January) at 10am and visitors can take a tour of the school and take a peek behind the curtains of one of the South Coast’s leading international schools.