By Edward Funnell, Communications Adviser
Many schools have a ‘House’ system. Originally set up during a time when many independent schools were heavily based around boarding, they were literally the named buildings where pupils slept, perhaps not unlike the modern ‘frat and sorority’ system at many American universities. In today’s educational setting, their purpose is to fulfil a much broader role that underpins the community spirit of a school. Most schools use a ‘house’ system to divide large their student body into smaller, supportive communities that foster a sense of belonging, cross-age mentorship, and school spirit. What varies so much are their varied identities whether they are named after national heroes, or notable alumni of a particular school and the number of ‘houses’ each school might have.
At Thames Christian, our houses are designed to act as role models of positive human endeavour and achievement while also inspiring in the young people at our school a healthy spirit of both collaboration and competition and they earn points for their house through academic effort and co-curricular participation. They also make the link with pastoral care, showing that the House system is one part of how each child is known and valued at our school. When they join the school, our pupils automatically become a member of a House (as do many of our staff).
There are four Houses at Thames Christian School. They are named after well-known individuals – all pioneers in their respective fields and each driven by their Christian faith to do good for their fellow citizens that set an example to others. All four often rejected the societal norms, demands or expectations of their time but went on to leave different but strong legacies. They represent complementary themes like social action, supporting the poor, pursuing truth, and promoting civil rights. Each of them also had a significant professional and/or personal connection to south London where our school is located.
You can read more about the famous people behind our houses and what they represented here:
Social action:
William Wilberforce 1759-1833
William Wilberforce was a politician and philanthropist who went on to become the leader of the movement to abolish the Atlantic slave trade. A native of Kingston upon Hull, he became the independent MP for Yorkshire from 1784 to 1812. Initially, he had little interest in religion but, in 1785, was converted to Christianity and became an evangelical Anglican, which resulted in major changes to his lifestyle and a lifelong concern for reform. Wilberforce was a deeply religious MP whose Christian faith prompted him to join the ‘Clapham Sect’, a Christian group campaigning against the slave trade and for reform of factory conditions in Britain. Using his position as an MP, Wilberforce became leader in the abolitionist movement resulting in the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and eventually in 1833, slavery itself in the British Empire.
Fighting for the poor:
Thomas Barnardo 1845-1905
Dr Barnardo was born in Dublin. He originally intended to become a missionary to China until he was drawn by the plight of large numbers of homeless and destitute children in London where he studied Medicine to become a doctor. In 1870, he started the first of his 112 homes to care for and educate ‘waifs and strays’. During his lifetime, and with the active support of his wife, he rescued and trained nearly 60,000 destitute children and assisted a quarter of a million children in need who would otherwise have been ‘rejected’ by society that regarded poverty as shameful. To this day, the charity he started continues to look after many vulnerable children.
Pursuit of Truth:
Florence Nightingale 1820-1910
Florence Nightingale was a celebrated English social reformer who took great comfort from her Christian faith and viewed her calling in reducing human suffering. Born in the city of Florence in Italy, she rejected the societal norms of her day to settle and get married. Instead, she said she felt called by God to serve as a nurse, and she came to prominence when serving as a nurse in the Crimean War alongside Mary Seacole. In 1860, Nightingale opened her nursing school at St Thomas’s Hospital London which laid the foundations of modern professional nursing. Her insights and reforms improved healthcare for all sections of society including nurses into the workhouses of mid-19th century Britain and much higher levels of health and sanitation in hospitals and infirmaries where many people died from illnesses like cholera and dysentery, and her methods to improvements to patient care were adopted not just in Britain but in many other countries.
Civil Rights:
Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945
Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran theologian and pastor. Born in Breslau (now part of Poland), he grew up to intellectual parents during the early years of the post-1918 rise of the Nazi Party and their vehemently anti-Semitic policies which he opposed. He was a man of faith and studied Theology both in Germany and then the United States. Originally a German nationalist, his faith drove him towards pacifism and on returning to Germany, he was ordained as a priest.
He initially led the anti-Nazi ‘Confessing Church’ which was a movement within German Protestantism that arose in opposition to government-sponsored efforts to unify all of the Protestant churches into a single pro-Nazi evangelical church. In the 1930s, as the church in Germany was increasingly pro-Nazi, he moved to London to pastor a church in Sydenham, south London, but returned regularly to Germany to promote his ministry.
At the outbreak of WW2, the Nazis banned Bonhoeffer from preaching and closed his seminary. He joined the German intelligence service, the Abwehr, but fed information to the Resistance to help German Jews escape to Switzerland. In 1943, he was arrested and imprisoned at Flossenburg concentration camp in southern Germany and eventually executed in April 1945, aged 39 and just weeks before the end of the war. He is considered a martyr for his faith.
