Head-less: Whitgift School in South Croydon, which uses the house and grounds of an Elizabethan admiral, is looking for a new headteacher
CROYDON IN CRISIS: To lose one head teacher in a single academic year is unfortunate. For Croydon’s biggest landowners to lose two from their private schools is beginning to appear worrying.
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
International challenge: Christopher Ramsey is leaving Whitgift after seven years as headmaster
Christopher Ramsey, the headmaster of the £24,000 per year Whitgift boys private secondary school, is to leave his job in July.
Ramsey, who has been head of the 1,400-pupil school since 2017, is understood to be taking up a post at “an international school”.
Ramsey is the second head at one of the large fee-paying schools run by the Whitgift Foundation to decide to leave this year.
He follows Jane Burton, the head at the Old Palace girls’ school, who announced her decision to retire at the end of the school year just before term began in September. The news of Burton’s departure came around the same time that the Foundation decided that there was “no viable alternative” to closing Old Palace by July 2025. It is reckoned that at least half of that school’s pupils have already sought to continue their education elsewhere.
This unusual churn among senior staff at the Foundation’s schools comes when the financial predicament facing the charity is becoming starker by the day. After 12 years of stasis and inaction over Westfield’s £1.4billion scheme to redevelop the Foundation’s big money-earner, the Whitgift Centre shopping mall in Croydon town centre, the charity is losing millions of pounds each year.
It has not been confirmed that Ramsey’s decision to leave Whitgift School is linked to the owners’ change in financial circumstances.
But sources inside the school suggest that, having ridden out the worst of the covid pandemic when some families withdrew their children from Foundation schools because of loss of income, the uncertainties over the Foundation’s declining property income is causing graver difficulties.
Whitgift – which in recent years has offered places for boarders, at almost £48,000 per year – has long had a deserved reputation for regarding “money is no object” when it comes to enhancing the place’s reputation.
The school still has a “menagerie”, including some flamingoes and exotic birds and wallabies, introduced by Ramsey’s predecessor, while peacocks roam around the extensive parkland grounds of Haling Park, the former stately home of Lord Howard of Effingham, Queen Elizabeth I’s admiral.
School coo: Whitgift has a menagerie while peacocks roam the grounds
While the Foundation has often emphasised the use of burseries to enable children from families with ordinary incomes to attend its private schools, at Whitgift these generous funding arrangements were often used to tempt gifted young rugby players or cricketers to sign up at 15 or in the Sixth Form, to help supercharge the school’s teams’ progress in national sports competitions.
And the crisis at the Whitgift Foundation is far from resolved: there has been no one working full-time in overall charge of the Foundation’s day-to-day operations – which include the management of almshouses and a care home – since May 2023, with the long-time CEO, Martin Corney, on long-term sick leave and eventually retiring in the autumn. A successor has not yet been appointed.
The news of Ramsey’s departure as Whitgift head comes as something of a surprise. His monthly blog on the school website was published as usual 10 days ago, welcoming pupils to the new term, without a hint of the tumultuous news to come.
Whitgift School and the Whitgift Foundation were both approached for comment, but there had been no response by time of publication.
Read more: Hammer blow for Whitgift Centre with new delay to masterplan
Read more: Chief exec stands down from struggling Whitgift Foundation
Read more: Foundation abandoned new school plan after taking £70m loan
Read more: Falling rolls and rising fees: how Old Palace got squeezed
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