Langlands School and College

Langlands School and College, in Chitral, North-West Pakistan, formerly known as Sayurj Public School, was the first private school in Chitral. Today it educates about a thousand pupils, aged from four to eighteen, on four separate sites in and above the town of Chitral. More than a third of the pupils are girls, and the school has a record of academic excellence. The best students have gone on to scholarships in Lahore, doctorates in Australia and exchange programmes in America. Although private, school fees are very low, even by local standards.

The school was founded in 1988 as a school for boys and girls aged five to ten years old. The following year, former British major Geoffrey D Langlands arrived to take over as headmaster. He, who had been a teacher in mathematics in Croydon before World War II, had arrived in British India on a troop carrier in 1944, and remained when India and Pakistan became independent nations; first as an instructor for the young Pakistani army for six years; and from 1953 as a teacher at Aitchison College in Lahore, Pakistan's answer to Eton College, where he taught pupils like Zafarullah Khan Jamali and Imran Khan. In 1979 he left Aitchison College for a position as headmaster of Cadet College Razmak, in North Waziristan, where he stayed until he was offered to take over the running of the school in Chitral.

When Langlands arrived in 1989, the school had 80 pupils, from nursery school to Class 4, and six female teachers, but under his direction the school grew quickly, with a new class added each year. Today, the school In 1993 he recruited the first male teachers, to teach science subjects. Today, the majority of teachers in the senior school are men.

From the start, Langlands was a staunch advocate of education for girls in Chitral, insisting on teaching them up to the age of eighteen. He encountered stiff opposition to this, but eventually convinced local leaders that society needed educated women. Girls are taught separately in the senior school, but they enjoy access to all the school’s facilities.

After suffering a stroke in 2008, the then 91-year-old Langlands started to contemplate retirement, and in September 2012, leadership of the school was transferred from the 94-year-old founder to 58-year-old British woman Carey Schofield, a foreign correspondent for London based newspapers for several decades and author of several books on military matters, among them Inside the Pakistan Army (2011).