Russell Speirs and Friends: Elizabeth Stone, Head of Winchester College

Elizabeth Stone, Head of Winchester College since September 2023, is the tenth guest in the “Russell Speirs and Friends” podcast series. In this episode, Elizabeth reminds Russell of their first encounter on a beach in Sydney, explains what led her to leave a promising career as a lawyer and take up teaching and, as with all the guests in the series, says what she thinks helps a school to thrive.
For Elizabeth Stone, “knowing what you stand for” is essential for a thriving school. “Schools are rich and complex ecosystems”, she explains, “which sit in the middle of very strong cultural currents”. With increasing pressure from well informed (and some less well informed) people to continuously add to the curriculum and to do things in certain ways, having a “solid grounding in what you stand for” is essential to navigate a way through those currents and know what not to change.
For example, in a school of 700 boarders, it is essential that people learn to live with each other in harmony (“Manners maketh man” is the famous motto of the school). Winchester has therefore resisted the move towards individual bedrooms in the boarding houses and, instead, has younger students in dormitories. They learn to avoid or deal with the consequences of arguments. “They learn the art of friendship”. And a scholarly tradition, known as Divs, is also fiercely protected. This is a series of unexamined courses throughout a student’s time at Winchester, which touches on art, poetry, politics and architecture, to give students insights into the arc of history, in line with the enthusiasms of their teachers.
In Elizabeth Stone, Winchester College has its first female “Headmaster” and the school is about to introduce girl boarders for the first time in its 750 year history and has already admitted some local day pupils. Knowing what to change and what not to change cannot be easy at Winchester College without a clear sense of what you stand for.