UPP to USP

During our Business Studies course this year we have studied,  through the help of case studies, a wide range of businesses and how they work. However, when we went on a trip to the Ultimate Picture Palace - located on Jeune Street (alongside the Cowley road) in Oxford - we got a front seat view into the world of the cinema business.

The Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford

The Ultimate Picture Palace's USP (unique Selling Proposition) is that the audience can enjoy classic films (and occasionally a big box office movie) with a beverage of their choice ranging from warming cups of coffee to relaxing glasses of wine and beer. Becky Hallsmith, the owner of the cinema, who has been running the business for almost a year spoke to us about the marketing strategies  she uses to entice people in (e.g. free glass of mulled wine with your first ticket) and to stay competitive with other cinemas (e.g. the price is significantly lower than the Odeon or the Vue). Becky confessed that most people don't appreciate how much work is involved in running a local cinema like hers, but despite the effort she enjoys it very much. Overall, our afternoon trip to the cinema helped the AS class develop a more realistic feel for what it's like to run a business and, obviously, helped us all to visualise it better as well.

Nathalie Rimensberger Lower Sixth

Emerging Artists

This has been a busy few weeks for some of our art students who have been finalising their portfolios to apply for places on Art Foundation courses. Many congratulations to Izzy Nicholson and Anastasia Frost who have been offered places on the highly competitive courses at Oxford Brookes and Abingdon and Witney College. Well done also to Yuna Choy for her offers from Central St Martins and Kingston University.

Yuna Choy, Izzy Nicholson, Anastasia Frost

At the moment Izzy is considering a career in set design (which fits well with her other A levels in Drama and English Literature), Anastasia may build on her interest in graphic novels (which she is using in her AQA Baccalaureate project turning extracts from poems into illustrated short stories) while Yuna is considering a career in art therapy.

Congratulations also to Annie Noble who has been offered a place at Abingdon & Witney College where she hopes to pursue her interest in Fine Art, Fashion and Textiles and Oria Hallward who's just been offered a place at the Arts University College at Bournemouth and is particularly interested in Photography and Filmmaking.

All of the students are looking forward to the opportunity to work on such prestigious courses in a range of media before finally specialising.

A Visit to Auschwitz - Part 2

d'Overbroeck's student Flora McGivan gives her account of the recent visit to Auschwitz.

The Lessons from Auschwitz project taught me that how ever hard it may be, we should try not to be bystanders. This was illustrated most pertinently when meeting Susan Pollack, an Auschwitz survivor, at a seminar before the visit. She truly inspired me to stand up for what I believe in. This lesson was reinforced through a visit to a local village where overnight 60% of the inhabitants vanished and their synagogue burnt. The educators made us think what we would do if we had been one of the 40% left behind.

Although visiting the death camps was a distressing and emotional experience, the trip left me with some hope for the future. It emphasised the importance of living your life to the full for those who did not get the chance while keeping their memories alive in an attempt to stop this tragedy from happening again. Susan explained that her way of dealing with the experience was to tell her story so that others could learn from the past. Meeting her and going to Auschwitz gave me a glimpse of the bravery and courage of each and every victim of the Holocaust and how we can learn so much from them.

When studying the Nazis in history, it is hard to take in the figures. But by meeting Susan before we left and reading poems and memoirs throughout our trip, the camp was re-humanized. By seeing their belongings and photos we saw how much we had in common with them, which enabled us to remember them with the respect they deserve. Through a candle-lit vigil, we were given the chance to reflect and find hope for the future - the most poignant moment for me.

Lessons from Auschwitz is an experience I'll never forget and something I feel truly privileged to have been part of.

A Visit to Auschwitz

The itinerary was daunting.  Check-in at 5 for the 7 a.m. flight to Cracow.  After landing, we’d be driven straight to the site of the former synagogue at Oswiecim, burnt down, like countless others, during the Second World War.  The significance of this particular synagogue?  Oswiecim is known in German as Auschwitz, a name that has become a byword for the infamous concentration camps situated near the town.  First, we’d be visiting ‘Auschwitz 1’, with its harrowing cabinet displays: vast piles of hair, spectacles, children’s shoes, false limbs, all routinely taken from prisoners before they were put to death.  Then on to Auschwitz-Birkenau, bleak and enormous, where the average life expectancy of those ‘lucky’ enough to be selected for slave labour was only three months.  Finally, we’d be bussed back to the airport for the return flight at 10:30 p.m.  The organisers of the visit, the Holocaust Educational Trust warned us of temperatures of minus 15°C.; the day would be extreme, both physically and emotionally. I found myself unwilling to tell friends I was going so as to avoid the question I could barely answer myself: Why?

After all, there are less gruelling ways of visiting Auschwitz.  The death-camps are well and truly on the tourist map. They’re even being sold as part of a stag-weekend package to Cracow. In that context, visiting with the HET project felt like approaching the place with proper seriousness. We were asked to think about the ethics of taking photographs at the sites.  In the orientation seminar a few days before the visit, we met Susan Pollock, an Auschwitz survivor, brought as a girl by cattle-truck to Auschwitz-Birkenau.  She was separated from her mother and brother on arrival.  It was night-time, she told us.  Barking dogs.  Incomprehensible commands.  She never saw her mother again.  Her brother was forced to become a Sonderkommando, and somehow survived, although his horrific experiences destroyed his mental health.  A true understanding of the terror experienced by Susan and hundreds of thousands of men, women and children as they were wrenched from their families was surely beyond our imaginings.  But, with night falling, and shivering in our thermals and woollens on the very spot where these cold-blooded ‘selections’ had taken place, we did gain a glimpse of something that few historical accounts could hope to convey.

Auschwitz was a place where those Jews who weren’t taken at once to the gas chambers were systematically treated like animals.  The Jewish writer Primo Levi remarks that he was beaten ‘without anger’, as someone might whip a beast of burden.  So our thanks should go the ‘educators’ from HET who managed to salvage at least some humanity from places whose sole purpose was to dehumanize the living and eradicate an entire people.  We were read poems and diary entries from survivors, shown photographs that had been buried out of reach of the industrial destruction of the Nazis, told about individual acts of resistance, some large, some small, but all signs that the will to live had not entirely been snuffed out.  And a day that could so easily have left us in despair ended on a note of hope with a simple candle-lighting ceremony.  Having witnessed the palpable darkness of the place, this somehow felt appropriate, a flickering symbol of the failure of the Nazi project, but a reminder, too, that without constant vigilance, such horrors can all too easily creep back out of the shadows.

Christopher Holland

¡Ingles Esta Prohibido!

In the early morning of the 22nd of Feburary, the A2 Spanish class left Oxford to begin their long journey to Salamanca, Spain, for a sunny, five day experience of Spanish language and culture! The students recall their trip below:

 "After sleeping much of the way, we arrived late in the afternoon in time for a typical Spanish dinner of paella and creme caramel! We were welcomed by the director of 'Colegio Delibes,' (the school we were going to be studying with) who took us to our residence where we settled into our room and nervously wondered what the next few days would bring. We were given a schedule for our stay and, forbidden from asking any questions in English, were forced to step out from within our comfort zones and ask our new teacher and activities director questions in Spanish!

We were to have 3 lessons on Thursday and Friday morning. The afternoons would be taken up with activities and the evenings with a meal (mainly tortillas (Spanish omelette), Gambas al Ajillo (shrimps) and enough jamón to fill our suitcases). As our teacher from d’Overbroeck’s  College is originally from Salamanca, she would be our guide on Saturday around the sites of the city, including the stork blessed Gothic/Romanic Cathedrals, the Spanish Civil War Archive and the Calisto y Melibea Garden. Then on Sunday we would travel back to Oxford - however I don’t think a day had ever seemed so far away!

It took us about 5 minutes on Thursday morning to realise how wonderful and enthusiastic our teachers were. Before we had left for Salamanca we had chosen lesson plans orientated around our exams and the literature we were reading, so it was easy for us to settle down and feel at home in the beautiful school situated a 15 minute walk from our residence. Every afternoon after lessons had finished we sat down in the majestic Plaza Mayor, which, illuminated by the bright sun, was overrun with little children and university students. On Saturday, in our free time, we discovered the main shopping street, and so 'had' to spend all our money on lovely summer clothes that we knew we wouldn't wear for another few months in chilly Oxford!

Our dinners were as full of laughter as they were eating and as a small group we got on really well, taking so many photos that it has taken us a week to sort through them all. Most nights we went out to a restaurant, however one night we went out for ‘churros y chocolate’, and sitting in a warm café with a cup full of thick hot chocolate and churros to match we never wanted to leave. (We enjoyed them so much that the next day we were back again for lunch, ignoring our burning tongues and an outside temperature of about 18 degrees!) On our last night we were taken out for Pinchos, also known as Tapas, where we bounced from restaurant to restaurant, trying to find space to eat amidst all the locals!

We woke up Sunday morning not really wanting to go home. After our initial hesitation at speaking only in Spanish, we had begun to speak it even between ourselves, enjoying the feel and sound of it. After hurriedly buying a baguette for the journey, we were taken to the bus station in the early afternoon, going through all our photos trying to recapture the memories we had of the trip. Sunday had come too fast, and even though all we wanted to do was stay in Salamanca with the sun, food, culture and people, we knew we had achieved so much and would hopefully continue to speak Spanish when we got home! As our plane lifted off and flew northwards towards the UK, we knew that we couldn’t have asked for anything more from the trip, or have been any luckier with our teachers, activities, and the wonderful city we had come to know.

Noemi Breiner, Cerys Llewellyn and Anastasia Bolshakova

"This is your Games"

Doulla Croft, the Business Development Director of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games came to talk to the Lower Sixth Enrichment groups where she gave a really interesting and personal insight into the commercial side of the Games. She stressed that with London 2012 the emphasis is on sustainability, how this will be the 'greenest Games' ever with 20% of the power coming from renewables and how a large proportion of materials after the Games will be reused in other places and venues.

Doulla Croft (Right) with Enrichment Co-ordinator, Kate Palmer

Doulla works for Nielsen who have been involved with many aspects of the Games with research into attitudes towards disability, tickets and pricing, the mascots (Wenlock and Mandeville), spectator experience and the Torch relay. The relay itself runs from 19th May to 27th July and will help build excitement towards the start of the Games. The torch will visit over 1000 cities, towns and villages, including an overnight stay in Oxford. Overall Doulla emphasised that everyone has access to the Games - whether it be through tickets, TV or social networking sites, the opportunities are vast.

Doulla told the group that there are numerous sponsors/partners at a variety of levels. From global giants such as Coca Cola and McDonalds (one student was very interested to know about their involvement) to banks such as Lloyds and car firms such as BMW. These companies apart from the financial involvements must also be committed to the Olympic values.

Doulla Croft speaking to Lower Sixth students

The Royal Wedding last year has also been carefully analysed by Nielsen since patterns that emerged here are thought to be a forerunner as to what may happen with public involvement and participation of the Games. It is hoped that there will be long and short term economic and social benefits locally and nationally from the Games experience with the regeneration of East London giving over 4,000 new homes, an upgraded transport system, Westfields shopping centre (the largest in Europe) and new job opportunities for local residents.

Will team GB deliver? We all hope so and wait with anticipation for the major event. As Doulla says:

“The experience of the Olympics will stay with you for the rest of your life.”

Kate Palmer
Enrichment Co-ordinator

Geography Lower Sixth Fieldtrip

Geography Lower Sixth fieldtrip (29^th February - 2^nd March)

On Wednesday 29^th February the Lower Sixth Geographers together with their teachers Kate Palmer and JP Davies set off full of anticipation to the beautiful county of Shropshire with the aim of improving and developing their fieldwork skills.

The focus was on hydrology and the day spent in the grounds of the Preston Montford Fieldcentre where students hammered infiltration pipes into the ground (Tsvetan Donov was an expert with the mallet!). They then poured in lots of water to examine the rate of flow of water into the ground and  whether it varied from grassland to woodland sites.

On Thursday a full day was spent in the Shropshire hills where a 2km stretch of Ashes Hollow River was surveyed downstream to see changes in relation to depth, width, velocity, wetted perimeter and gradient. The write-up at the Fieldcentre followed until 8.30pm much to the students’ pleasure before competitive snooker and bar football tournaments took place into the late evening along with some dance classes led by Eloise Broadway and Fiona Quirke.

On Friday (after all the students had enjoyed another cooked breakfast) we had a 2-hour visit to Shrewsbury to see new flood defences and assess the potential flood risk in different areas of the town. Some GIS processing took place back at the centre before we took the coach journey back to Oxford full of very tired students, each looking forward to their home comforts and with their Geography fieldwork knowledge and experience of the British countryside greatly expanded.

Kate Palmer
Head of Geography

Life in the Fast Lane

Greaves Motorsport, managed by former d'Overbroeck's student Jacob Greaves, have unveiled their new livery for 2012. “We have been very happy with the scheme that we have run for the past two years," Greaves explained, "[and] we think that the subtle changes made will enhance what is already a very distinctive and contemporary design.”

Whilst he was a student at d'Overbroeck's, Jacob Greaves combined his studies with a lifelong passion for racing, driving a Radical SR8 in both the European and UK Championships. Since he was a young boy he's been involved in some form with motor racing, competing as a driver for two and a half years from the age of 16. During this time he achieved success, winning the Radical World Cup in his class in 2006.

The Greaves Motorsport livery 2012

Since then Jacob has moved into the management side of racing and is now Team Manager of Greaves Motorsport with a wide range of responsibilities including logistics; liasing with the media, sponsors and suppliers; managing the team's day to day finances and organising events for Greaves Motorsport supporters both on and off track. And in this role he's achieved more success, winning the Le Mans 24 Hours in 2011 in the LMP2 class.

Karim Ojjeh, Tom Kimber-Smith and Olivier Lombard with Jacob Greaves on the podium.
Click here to read more (external webpage)