Dear all, Upon inheriting the Looking Glass from our predecessors, we identified a number of key issues. Firstly, there were simply not enough articles being published, due both to a lack of submissions from the school community and limited responsiveness from the previous Academic Team. Secondly, the Looking Glass had not been advertised or explained effectively enough to the wider school community. As a result, we plan to implement a more consistent and engaging stream of articles on the Looking Glass. As part of this initiative, we are looking to recruit a select group of keen writers from across the lower school who would be willing to produce one high-quality piece of writing, discussion, or media each month for publication on the Looking Glass. We believe this will be hugely beneficial both to the school community, which will gain access to a wider range of opinions and viewpoints, and to prospective writers, who will be able to reference their experience contributing to the Look...
Economics: How might present day inequalities (for example in income, opportunities, or access to services) be related to colonialism?
Note: The following essay was written by Freddie Parr L6 (20parrf@students.watfordboys.org), and was highly commended in the Rex Nettleford Essay Competition 2026 The persistence of present day global inequality presents a profound paradox. Despite decades of economic growth and the supposed triumph of liberalising markets, the world's richest 1% own more wealth than 95% of humanity (Oxfam International, 2024), while the Global South, home to 79% of the world's population, controls just 31% of global wealth (Behar, 2025). This disparity cannot be adequately explained by contemporary policy failures alone; instead one must move beyond linear causality to analyse the durable institutional structures bequeathed by colonialism. In this essay I will argue that present-day inequalities are actively reproduced through the path-dependent operation of extractive institutions established during the colonial era, which have shown remarkable adaptability in the twenty-first century. Utilis...