Moving Forward: The Proposed Academy at Ashford

Appointment of Principal Designate

The sponsors have announced the appointment of John McParland as Principal Designate and he will take up the post from 1 April 2010.  John has taught in schools in Essex, London, Surrey and Kent; he joins the proposed academy from Saint Simon Stock Catholic School in Maidstone.

John writes in the Spring newsletter: “I am passionate in my belief that every young person should have the opportunity to achieve academic success, be encouraged to raise their aspirations and have the opportunity to learn in an environment within which every individual is encouraged and valued.”

John has already met some staff members and is looking forward to meeting with students, parents, staff, governors and the local community to shape the future success of the academy.

What’s in a name? The John Wallis Church of England Academy

There was wide consultation about the name for the proposed academy at Ashford and the chosen name has now been confirmed.  Appropriately for an academy with specialisms in Maths and Technology, it celebrates a local seventeenth-century mathematician.

John Wallis was born in Ashford in 1616 and was initially educated there. He wrote in his autobiography:  “It was always my affection, even from a child, not only to learn by rote, but to know the grounds or reasons of what I learnt; to inform my judgement as well as to furnish my memory”.  This statement about learning might well be one of the underlying principles of the Ashford academy.

His parents intended him to be a doctor, but while at Cambridge University his interests began to centre on Mathematics.  He deciphered Royalist coded messages for the Parliamentarian cause in the Civil War and realised that a variable key was more secure than a secret algorithm. 

He was appointed to the Savilian Chair of Geometry at Oxford in 1649.  He made significant contributions to trigonometry, calculus, geometry and the analysis of infinite series. 

He is generally credited with the number line; where numbers are represented in a line with the positive numbers increasing to the right and the negative numbers to the left.  He was also the first person to use the now common symbol for infinity (known as a lemniscate).

He was noted for his ability to do complicated mental calculations, which he often did – instead of counting sheep – when he lay awake unable to sleep.  One night he calculated in his head the square root of a number with 53 digits.  After that, he dictated the 27 digit answer from memory in the morning.

His interests were not limited to Mathematics; he wrote on theology, logic, English grammar and philosophy as well as devising a system for teaching deaf people who could not speak.  Iain Pears’ novel – An Instance of the Fingerpost – has Wallis as one of its characters.