In pursuit of the Winton Cup

Determined to go that one step further than our second place finish last year, a group of seven Swanbournians set off for the annual Winton Cup at Stowe. The Winton Cup is a humanities competition between prep schools from near and far, where pupils are presented with a theme and scored on their ability to contribute originally and effectively to the debate on that topic. The Cup gets its name from Stowe alumnus Nicholas Winton, who famously saved over 600 Jewish children in then-Czechoslovakia from the advancing Third Reich in the weeks before the start of the Second World War. His efforts formed part of the greater British Kindertransport, which saved over 10,000 children in the years 1938-9. 

The theme this year was the hugely topical ‘How do we build climate resilience?’ The pupils were welcomed to Stowe by visiting speaker Tanya Brittain, General Manager at the National Trust, who spoke of the new challenges that climate change has brought to protecting our parks and gardens. Despite acknowledging the issues we face in the world today from climate change, Mrs Brittain reminded us, through the example of Nicholas Winton, that individuals with the will to make a change can have a huge impact. 

From this point our pupils embarked into five rounds of challenging and thought provoking debate. We looked at the topic of climate resilience in a variety of ways, these different lenses providing the framework for each round. In our philosophical round we were asked to consider the idea of blame and whether or not that helped us with finding a solution to the current crisis. In geography we used the MIT created https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/ to explore different scenarios to explore what could be done to lower the Earth’s growing temperature. In politics, our pupils took on the role of the Shadow Cabinet in a House of Commons style debate on introducing legislation to phase out petrol cars.

In History of Art, pupils explored the impact that the changing world has had on art, with a focus on the rapid change that occurred during the Industrial Revolution. Finally, in History, we examined previous examples of climate disasters and the human response, to see if the solution to the problems our world faces could be found by looking to our past. 

With these five rounds complete, our pupils gathered with the other schools to await the results, presented by Dr Wallersteiner, Head at The Stowe Group. History on this occasion repeated itself as Swanbourne was pipped to the post of first place by just one point. Our Swanbourne pupils were fantastic ambassadors for the school and the humanities department, embracing the challenge of the day with aplomb. With a relatively young team comprising of only Year 6 pupils, the hope is that this experience will be hugely valuable to our attempt next year to bring the coveted Winton Cup to Swanbourne House.  – Mr Barnard

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Swanbourne House is an independent Day and Boarding School for children aged 3 – 13 years. The school is based in 55 acres of Buckinghamshire countryside, a short drive from Central Milton Keynes and near Buckingham, Leighton Buzzard, Woburn, Aspley Guise and Aylesbury.