The incoming head of the state’s top-performing private school says external coaching risks robbing students of time spent playing sport, being bored or even their childhood as he says he will try to get parents to “relax a bit” and trust teachers to deliver their sons’ education.
Sydney Grammar headmaster Stuart McPherson has spent 25 years working in United Kingdom boarding schools, including Eton, but has been struck by the sheer intensity of pressure on students to perform in the Higher School Certificate.
“There’s a higher degree of anxiety about the whole business in NSW than perhaps the UK,” he said.
“And that expresses itself in more parents feeling that they need to invest in extra coaching for their kids through the whole process of getting ready for the HSC.
“The intense focus – right down to individual stories about who got 99.95 and how they get [it] and where they live, and what’s their story – you don’t see that in the UK.”
To protect students from external pressure and prevent them from spending time in coaching centres after a long day at school, he is reassuring parents the school can deliver an education and they do not need to pay for external tutors.
“If you’re not careful, tutoring robs a child of his childhood, the opportunity to be bored or to play another sport, or whatever it is you do with your time,” he says.
“You don’t want to peak when you’re 17 or think that everything rests on your HSC.”
He tells students that decades after graduating, they are never going to sit through an interesting conversation while anxiously waiting to drop in the detail that they received a 99.95 ATAR. “I mean, who cares? These things are a means to an end.”
McPherson is speaking to the Herald inside the wood-panelled headmaster’s study in the school’s main building on the edge of Sydney’s Hyde Park. It’s a rainy and humid summer day, five weeks after he returned to Australia following 25 years working in English boarding schools.
He is the 13th headmaster in the school’s 169-year history and the role is a homecoming of sorts. McPherson grew up in Perth, attended Applecross High, a local state high school, and planned to study accounting at the University of Western Australia, but ultimately became a teacher. He landed his first job at Sydney Grammar in 1990 teaching commerce and economics before “pushing” his way into the English department.
“I didn’t have some romantic notion to come back to Australia. I hadn’t applied for any jobs in Australia in 25 years, but Grammar … this is why I wanted to come back,” he says.
Since arriving in Sydney, he is reminded how much the school offers, from classical music to sport, and jokes it is almost a full-time job being a parent attending all the extracurricular events.
“The parents, if they want a transaction, they know they should go somewhere else. Grammar is not about transactions: pay your fee and we’ll give you this. That’s just not the way it works here.”
After his first decade of teaching at Grammar, McPherson moved to the United Kingdom in 2000 and got a job at 586-year-old English boarding school Eton, whose alumni include princes William and Harry. He remembers being struck by the customs and traditions of the school, including the uniform that he says to an outsider can look unusual and antiquated.
“You have to wear, effectively, morning suits. So it’s grey and black, striped trousers, a white, wing collar shirt, white bow tie, black waistcoat, black coat. That’s the master’s dress.”
While it might not be for everyone, McPherson could see how schools such as Eton and Grammar understood how rules and the restraint they bring helped intellectual freedom flourish.
“We’ve got school rules, and they have them in Eton as well, and good systems for overseeing them. But it’s not about the rules, it’s about the freedoms that you get by being a boy at this school.
“What would I bring from Eton? My answer to that is nothing. There’s no part of me that is seeking to bring anything about that school, or indeed, my previous one to Grammar, because Grammar is its own thing.”
Grammar performs exceptionally well in the HSC each year, and almost half of the 2025 graduating class received an ATAR of 98 or above. The school took out seven first-in-course awards in the HSC, the most of any school, across a range of humanities subjects including numerous classical languages. McPherson says the school’s culture among students is about understatement when it comes to academic achievement.
‘You can feel the concentration as you walk around this place.’
Sydney Grammar headmaster Stuart McPherson
“We do understatement when it comes to achievement, and some of the achievement is extraordinary, but these boys will not blow their own trumpets,” he said.
After becoming a housemaster at Eton, McPherson became the head of a co-ed Catholic boarding school south of London, Worth School, in 2015. Despite his experience, there are no plans to admit girls to Grammar.
He notes debates over co-education have focused on elite boys’ schools admitting girls – and never the other way around. McPherson said he sent his own children to single-sex schools and says there’s a place for them in the broader education system.
“If you’re a parent, I don’t know how much it matters whether you go to single sex or co-ed, as long as the culture of the school is one in which your child can flourish, and single-sex really works for the flourishing of boys and girls,” he said.
Prospective Sydney Grammar students sit an entrance test ahead of year 7. In year 12, it has its own HSC subject selection criteria: students must do at least one science or maths subject, at least two humanities subjects and 12 units of study in year 12. By comparison, other students in NSW must do 10 units of study, typically equating to five subjects.
“The Herald never mentions this, when Grammar comes third or fourth [in HSC league tables], the fact that we’re doing more units than the schools that come above us or below us. We don’t care about that, but it is a fact.”
Since taking up the job, he has said to students that every morning of school, his office door is literally open if they wish to come in and speak to him.
“I’ve said to them, ‘I can’t promise I’ll agree with you about everything, but I’ll certainly listen to you’. I think it’s important to be available to your boys and to try and know who they are.”
One thing McPherson is not about to change is the school’s famously restrained approach to the use of technology.
“Grammar’s approach is cutting-edge,” he said.
Technology is used sparingly, meaning most people use pens and paper and little else in the classroom. The policy has attracted interest from staff at other schools who want to come and see how the school functions without laptops.
“I just don’t buy the arguments that tech in the classroom makes for better students. I actually think the opposite happens. And so you can feel the concentration as you walk around this place. The boys are part of an age‑old equation that works.”
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