Just a week into the new school year and already the summer seems like a distant memory. Every year on the day before the start of term we welcome our new Year 7 cohort and give them a chance to familiarise themselves with the site, spend some time with their tutors and generally get themselves ready for the move to secondary school and its accompanying challenges.

How do you react to behaviour that has a negative impact on you? Anger, judgement, and blame?  How productive is this reaction?  What if the slights you’ve experienced or the harm they have done was not inflicted intentionally?  What if the perpetrator thought that they were doing the right thing – for them or even possibly for you?

What do the following all have in common?

Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi, Margaret Thatcher, Martin Luther King Jnr, Greta Thunberg, Winston Churchill, Jacinda Ardern

The change of year is a good time for reflection.

It has been lovely to welcome everyone back to school this week and hear a little about some of the things they have been up to over the break. I hope that you all had an enjoyable half-term and spent some quality time with friends and family.  Perhaps like me, you spent some of that time enjoying at least some of the huge amount of world-class sport taking place both in the UK and around the world at the moment.

I wanted to take this opportunity to congratulate both last year’s Upper Sixth and the current Lower Sixth on their public examination success. As the first public examinations sat in two years, their results are a testament to the hard work and diligence both cohorts have displayed throughout the challenges of the pandemic.