Dulwich’s prefect team is a group of diligent young student leaders. The team comprises over 28 prefects and 6 head students, all from year 12. The group is close-knit and strives to represent the school’s excellence by working to uphold Dulwich’s tradition of a professional, disciplined, and scholastic demeanor. The team is extremely disciplined and consists of many leaders, kind of like the prefects in Harry Potter.
I am a prefect myself, and as such, I am assigned certain duties. There is morning duty, which consists of standing at the front door and greeting fellow students and teachers as they enter the school every morning. Game room duty consists of supervising the game room, where there is a pool table for all students to enjoy at break times.
There are three forms of lunch duty: front door is run by two prefects at a time, supervising the flow of students that enter the lunch room by allowing specific year groups in at a given time and also preventing people from bringing their backpacks into the canteen; roaming is making sure that all students clean up their lunches after eating them and ensuring that students are appropriately dressed (i.e. their tie is done up and their top buttons buttoned); and lastly, there is back door, which is making sure students don’t sneak into the cafeteria by entering through the back door. We’ll also open the door for students wishing to eat outside but can’t open the door because their hands are full. Prefects also have the responsibility to teach a class in Key Stage 3 (middle school) about the Dulwich value of the week. We are also given the responsibility to ensure that all students are appropriately dressed when we see them in the corridors.
The Prefect Team would not operate properly without its leaders: Head Boy BJ Sananvatananont, Head Girl Kyoka Kosugi, Deputy Head Girls Caitlin Choe and Elena Reid, and Deputy Head Boys Mike Afnan and Sam Ross. They manage the roster and the organization of the prefect team and hold organizational meetings, while giving weekly updates. They take on this additional responsibility of running the prefect team as well as working as a normal prefect as well.
There are then two teachers that ensure that the prefect team and head team are operating smoothly and that is Mr. Hugo Battersby and Ms. Olivia Bugden, who oversee most of our activities, though for the most part, the team is student-led. The Prefect Team assists the school community by ensuring that the students exhibit the type of English discipline and values that we hold dearly at Dulwich.
Michelle Jong is a 16-year-old Year 12 student at Dulwich College Beijing and has been attending Dulwich since Year 4. From China and the US, she has been living in Beijing her entire life. Her favorite subjects are English, History and Economics.
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Photo courtesy of Michelle Jong
