A number of ECF directors and ECP graduates had the pleasure of attending the Czech British Chamber of Commerce and British Czech & Slovak Association Annual Dinner, held at the May Fair Hotel on 22 November 2024.
It was a great evening with several inspirational guest speakers. ECP Headmaster Dr Nigel Brown spoke about the ECP and its mission to provide an English-medium academic education to young people in Prague and to develop every individual’s potential to the full to prepare them for the challenges of today’s globalised society. We were pleased to see support for the ECP from the attendees and hope to stay in touch with them in the future.
Photographs by Erik Weisenpacher from @doubleyoubrothers
On Tuesday 5 November we celebrated the ECP’s 30th anniversary and Founders’ Day at Pražská křižovatka (Prague Crossroads), a spectacular meeting place in a former church founded by St Vaclav that is one of the projects of the Dagmar and Václav Havel Foundation.
It was particularly welcome to be able to celebrate this year following the news that HM King Charles III has kindly agreed to continue as Royal Patron following his accession to the throne – the King was a Founder Patron of the College alongside President Vaclav Havel.
We were joined by two Founder Governors, Ann Lewis and Martyn Bond, as well as by Vanessa Ward, the daughter of Hubert Ward, the Founding Headmaster of the College, who died recently. Vanessa Ward spoke movingly about her memories of her father and the adventure of starting a new school in Prague. She presented a scrapbook of press cuttings from those days which will form part of the College’s archives.
As ever, it was the students who set the tone of the evening, with prize-winners, musical and dramatic performers and the stories of our Talent Award winners all demonstrating the imagination and creativity of ECP – staff, students and parents.
There was also a very impressive display of artwork. The highlight was an amazing model of the reconstructed and extended school building. It was built by Year 3 student and aspiring architect, Ariya Man, and was complete with the roof and lower floors lifting up automatically to reveal classrooms filled with 3-D printed plastic furniture.
Maxine is the first holder of the English College Foundation Scholarship at the English College in Prague. The Scholarship is awarded to a student who wishes to take the IB but whose family would not be able to afford the fees.
Maxine has just started her IB course after a first year she found challenging, especially Physics and Chemistry, which she had never studied before. She enjoyed working on a team project focusing on eco-creativity which helped her with cooperation, time management and experiencing how much work goes behind planning an event.
Now embarked on the IB programme, she is particularly enjoying Philosophy, another new subject. She says: “I’m continuing with my passion for Drama and English, and I appreciate the wide range of topics we cover, as I find all of them interesting. I think these two subjects will really help me with my future studies/career, as I’m planning to either stay in the Czech Republic and do a year abroad, or study in France (I am a dual national). I’d love to study either literature or something with film or media.”
We wish Maxine all the best with her further studies and future career.
During a recent visit to Prague, ECF Directors who are also Governors of the English College were able to take a look at the site on Sokolovska where the old English College building is being rebuilt and extended.
The building is currently a hollow shell stripped back to its brick framework, as you can see in the photo. The demolition work is more or less complete, and rebuilding the interior can now go ahead. The aim is to have the original building ready to take in students by autumn 2025.
Building of the extension can then go ahead with a target date for completion in 2026, at which point the whole school community can be on the single site for the first time in a dozen years. The school annex across the road, where the senior pupils have been housed during this period, can then be relinquished.
The alumni drinks party hosted by the English College Foundation in October has become a regular feature of our calendar going back many years. Recently, the ever-popular venue has been the Savoy Tap pub in Savoy Street just off the Strand. We have the upper room all to ourselves, complete with our own bar and barman, and the event gives newly-arrived students an early taste of a historic London pub.
The aim of the event is to enable new graduates of the English College recently arrived to study in the UK an opportunity to meet alumni of earlier vintages. Those present this time included an early ECP student who had left Prague for Bristol to take her IB, but now decided she wanted to get back in touch with her fellow-students in Prague all these years later. At the other end of the spectrum, we were delighted to welcome seven of the ECP 2024 graduates studying at various universities and colleges in London (plus one from Edinburgh!).
Four of the eight Directors of the Foundation are now ECP alumni, having graduated between 2002 to 2014. All ECP alumni are welcome at our events, so if you are not already known to us, please contact info@englishcollegefoundation.co.uk to be put on our mailing list.
Her Excellency Marie Chatardova, Ambassador of the Czech Republic, kindly hosted a Reception in support of the English College Foundation at her Residence in Hampstead on 26 September 2024. Such Receptions have been held every year since before the English College opened in 1994, barring the covid period.
Despite the rain, this was a lively and convivial evening, with music from a jazz duo, a delicious supper prepared by the Ambassador’s top chef, and a raffle with myriad prizes.
As always, this was also a fund-raising event, and raised more than £2000 for the English College Foundation Scholarship Fund, which sponsors a student at the College.
Among the speakers that night was Devid Jehlicka, a former holder of a scholarship at the English College. He was raised in a children’s home, but thanks to his scholarship was able to enjoy the school’s exceptional teaching and warm relationships. With excellent IB results he was accepted for LSE, from which he recently graduated. Throughout his studies he volunteered to work with young people at Arsenal. He is now coaching at Arsenal while contemplating his next career move.
The English College’s scholarship programme enables many bright children from families of limited means or difficult circumstances to flourish. So fund-raising will continue both here and in Prague. If you would like to contribute, you can do so here.
ECF Members were sad to hear of the death of Hubert Ward, the first Headmaster of the English College. Two founder-directors of the ECF, Martyn Bond and Ann Lewis, worked closely with Hubert from his appointment through the two years in London while the financial and administrative framework for the College was put in place into the early years in Prague, when he worked to turn the founders’ vision into a reality. Hubert, as a mathematician, worked wonders in the financial perils of the early years, while his late wife Elizabeth taught in the College on a voluntary basis. Their contribution to the creation of the English College is incalculable.
ECF Chairman Elizabeth Cooke, with Martyn Bond and Ann Lewis and the Headmaster Nigel Brown, attended Hubert’s funeral and welcomed the opportunity to express their condolences to Hubert’s widow Judy and his children.
A full obituary can be found on the English College website here.
We were delighted to receive the news from Buckingham Palace that HM King Charles III has kindly agreed to continue as Patron of The English College Foundation, and by extension of the English College in Prague.
The Headmaster of the English College, Dr Nigel Brown, said: “We have always been proud that our Founder Patrons were the then His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, and President Václav Havel. Prince Charles has visited the College twice, in 2000 and 2010, and many of our former students still talk about the time they were able to meet him and to tell him about their studies at the English College.”
To mark the first anniversary of HM The King’s coronation last May, a new list of the King’s patronages has been announced. The English College Foundation – the name of the UK-registered charity that founded the English College in Prague in 1992 – will continue to retain the patronage of His Majesty King Charles III.
We are very grateful that King Charles has decided to continue as Patron of the Foundation and the College. We send him our best wishes and look forward to welcoming him back to Prague again in the future.
The business was disposed of swiftly: 3 directors reappointed, and Annual Report and Accounts approved.
The Headmaster, Dr Nigel Brown, provided an update on the building renovation project. The building work should begin shortly. Meanwhile the school is using two venues 25 mins apart – the school’s existing annex and a primary school not yet fully occupied. The teachers are walking between the two so that students don’t have to. They are getting plenty of exercise as a result! The Headmaster further noted some practical difficulties and the anticipated duration of the building work.
Dr Brown reported that the ECF scholarship student (for year 4, 5 and 6), Maxine Janecek, is an exceptional student and is having a fantastic time at ECP.
The IB results this year have been exceptional with ECP ranked best in the EU. Interest in ECP is growing every year.
On the topic of scholarships, the Headmaster noted that he is looking to increase fundraising efforts with the aim of boosting scholarship funds from 8% to 10% of income. He also highlighted the exceptional life changing scholarships funded by ECP alumnus Jan Barta.
The AGM enjoyed two speeches by ECP alumni.
Petra Freddi (1999) was a student in ECP’s first year. She remembered how an advert shown her by her grandmother had ignited an interest in a British education. Without telling her parents, she applied and, following a successful interview, was offered a full ECP scholarship. She reflected how important her ECP experience was in shaping her life both educational and professional. She had a successful career in Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers as well as with private equity. Having spent much of her career in Hong Kong and Singapore, she is now based in London working for the Milken Institute.
Yegor Lanovenko (2010) reflected on how his family history, with grandparents peasants near Odesa but determined he should go to university, led to him becoming an ECP student and to where he is now. After graduating from the University of Bristol, Yegor embarked on a career in finance working for JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank and now private equity. He also created Opora, the largest Ukrainian charity in the UK, assisting Ukrainian war refugees. His efforts have not gone unnoticed: he was invited to a reception at No. 10 for key people dealing with the refugee crisis.
The English College in Prague (ECP) takes its inspiration from the Prague English Grammar School (PEGS), which existed from the 1920s until shut down by the Nazis in 1939 and then, after a brief post-war flowering, shut again by the Communists in 1953. The Many former PEGS students looked back fondly on their school days, and took a keen interest in the fledgling English College. One such link returned to prominence recently.
The photo above shows Eva Stanovska in 1947 when Eva was a 16-year-old student at PEGS. She had attended a Scout and Guide folk dance festival at Hampton Court during the summer of 1947, where she discovered that the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip was due to take place on her birthday that November. She suggested to her PEGS classmates that they should send a Czech national costume to the royal couple as a wedding present. They agreed, but realised that Princess Elizabeth would not know how the costume should be worn, so this photo of Eva accompanied the costume to London.
Eva and her husband left Czechoslovakia in 1968 and moved to the United States, where she worked at Harvard as Librarian at the famous Museum of Comparative Zoology. She had not been allowed to study in Prague because her father had been imprisoned by the Communists in 1952 after a show trial. She went on to obtain a degree at Harvard while working there full time, finally becoming Dr Eva Jonas after the fall of communism, when Charles University recognised her achievements.
Eva died in 2020 and her daughter Olga Jonas decided to establish a scholarship in her memory at the English College, which Eva had supported from its inception.
This decision was announced at the ECP Founders’ Day in October 2023, when a new ECP Scholarship Fundraising Appeal was launched with the aim of raising funds to assist more students from lower income families to attend the English College.
Image: Olga Jonas at the ECP Founders’ Day event in Prague, October 2023, holding flowers
With substantial donations also from two founder governors of the English College, Martyn Bond and Ann Lewis, the ECP Scholarship Fundraising Appeal got off to a flying start.
Anyone wishing to donate to the Appeal can do so here.
