Olivia Waller
Jon Fox
O livia began her career at Dulwich in 2008. A favourite with boys and staff alike, Olivia quickly settled into her role as a teacher of Religious Studies with professionalism and ease. A committed and hardworking member of the Religion and Theology Department, Olivia’s contribution to maintaining healthy numbers of boys opting to study our subject at GCSE and A-level cannot pass unmentioned; nor can the two excellent overseas trips she led to Jordan and Israel in 2012, and more recently to Nepal in October 2014. Early in her career here, Olivia took on responsibility for Community Service and for five years she offered 160 boys from Year 10 and above the opportunity to get involved in a variety of worthwhile local projects, and was dedicated to providing a wide range of activities each week to help develop boys’ skills and expertise. T he mythic song of Philomela, the nightingale, has become a familiar metaphor for beauty in language for readers of the Western canon. Its presentation in Ovid and Shakespeare is also a research interest for Beatrice Riddiford: how fitting that we may connect Beatrice and Philomela, singers of beauty. Beatrice joined the College in September 2009, having cut her teeth at Magdalen College School after completing her studies in English at Oxford. That Beatrice took up her post in the English Department at roughly the same time as Benedict (Morrison) prompts a further literary allusion, but this was to be a professional tenure of no mere wit-snapping, nor one dulled by the necessary three-year completion of her GTP and NQT paperwork. On the contrary, Beatrice’s approach to the wide span of her duties was marked unerringly by integrity, diligence, gravitas and good grace: here was much ado about something. Evidence of her lithe intellect was no more apparent than in her quite astonishing teaching of Robert Browning at A-level, where she found both the scholarly and emotional
Olivia headed up the PSHE (now Wellbeing) Department twice when Sarah Griffiths was on maternity leave and as a result of her excellent stewardship, secured the permanent position of Deputy Head of this department in 2014. Similarly, seeking greater pastoral responsibility, Olivia confidently secured the position as Visiting House Tutor in the Orchard in 2011 and became the Resident Tutor in 2013: both of these roles were executed with great aplomb. In the summer of 2014, Olivia was appointed as Housemistress of Blue House (Roedean School), a thoroughly well-deserved appointment and natural progression to all of her accomplishments at Dulwich. Olivia, you are an exceptional and gifted teacher and the Common Room wishes you all the best for the future in what will be, I know, a very long and distinguished career.
Rebecca Rowe
Richard Jones
Sioban Witney Low
Stephen Padfield
Tom Quilter
Stuart Lock
Max Rayner
Beatrice Riddiford
Richard Sutton
resources to steer the boys to exceptional critical lucidity; her Chaucer investigations for the Oxbridge English classes were hardly less impressive. As a colleague, Beatrice brought absolute commitment and faultless judgement to her teaching at whatever level over her five years at the College, including one especially feisty Year 11 form; in the English Office, it was her charismatic warmth and intellectual generosity which marked her out. More widely, Beatrice proved to be an enormous asset in her pastoral work as an Upper School tutor, professional mentor, and in running the Community Service project at Langbourne Primary School, where College boys would help in a literacy initiative. The most glamorous of her co- curricular responsibilities was as Co-Editor of The Alleynian , taking responsibility for one particularly eclectic edition, which, in a seismic shift, saw boys reclaim ownership of their material. Beatrice is greatly missed. As a wife and mother to Alex and Theo, Beatrice has taken up a new but no less beautiful song, but this must only be a temporary reprieve: she is too good not to come back to the profession.
Vivien Zhang
Zoe Humm
Tom Woodhuysen
Susan Roberts
Olivia Waller
Ovidiu Precup
Rachel Collier
Ralph Mainard
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