Good morning everybody and welcome back to school for the start of the summer term. I hope you had a good holiday and you all found some time to relax and recharge your batteries ready for the term ahead.
Good morning everybody and welcome back to school for the start of the summer term. I hope you had a good holiday and you all found some time to relax and recharge your batteries ready for the term ahead.
It has been a busy holiday – alongside your own holidays with your nearest and dearest, there were also many school trips and activities which took place, too.
I hope that those of you who took part in these trips, enjoyed them. I know that the staff wanted me to share with you that they thought you were all good company, and you were a credit to the school. I am of course, also extremely grateful to the staff themselves for generously giving up their own holiday to accompany you.
As well as those residential trips, a lot of academic help sessions have taken place over the holidays for those of you that are in exam years. Teachers in the English, maths, DT, Art and Geography departments have all given of their time to make sure that those exam groups are well placed ready for their exams.
To all the teachers involved in holiday activities, a big thank you for your time and effort.
You will have also noticed the amount of work that has taken place over the holidays by the support staff. Holidays are the times when our excellent teams can really get to work and access classrooms and other spaces without term time traffic. Over the Easter break, a huge amount of work has been completed, from installing a new heating system in science, a new CCTV system around the school, refurbishing the Thompson block classrooms, getting the pitches ready for cricket, adding a bore hole to the site, planting new hedges, building fences and installing a new display to welcome guests into the school. They have done an amazing job, and I know that you are going to enjoy the grounds too, but also to help maintain them and give them the respect they deserve.
Now, the more eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that there are slightly fewer of us this morning than we usually have in an assembly. Some pupils are sitting a 2nd set of mock exams readying themselves for the upcoming public exams. For them, their holidays have been head down revising hard, ready for their first exams which will start in 2 weeks’ time. We collectively wish them the best of luck – indeed it won’t be long before we say goodbye to them as they go on their exam leave. And with exam leave that also means that this assembly hall will be out of action as it will be the venue for those exams. Next week we will have one last whole school assembly for a while until the exams are over. We will continue to meet for assemblies, but break up into year group assemblies until those exams are over.
That means that I don’t have that many opportunities to share my thoughts and ideas with you apart from today. So I thought I would give you something to think about for the entire term rather than just for this week or the next few days.
Now I spent the holiday doing quite a bit of work. I was recruiting new members of staff well into the first week, I was interviewing prospective pupils in Poland in the second week and then I was planning for this coming term last week. But in that time, there were some highlights. I have my 45 birthday, very quiet affair as I am starting to feel my age these days, and I also did manage to get away to North Norfolk for 4 days with the family. For those of you that know that area well, my family and I went to Blakeney, which is a little village near the sea with huge beaches and wild scenery. The sunshine was great, but the wind was biting. That meant that we spent quite a bit of time indoors and reading. This is not something I have the time to do much of these days as my usual day is running between meetings and events, family time and the odd bit of exercise if I am lucky. So I decided to re-read two short books that I first read many years ago, but I thought would be interesting to revisit, given the era we now find ourselves in. Those books were 1984 and Brave New World, which both portrayed an image of the future when they were written around 1950. Perhaps I was also inspired by watching the new series of Black Mirror on Netflix, which has its own interesting take on the future.
Now, for those of you that have not read these books, 1984 is a novel written by George Orwell about a future world of mass surveillance and a repressive regimentation of people within society. It resonates with the life that we now live in with mass surveillance, information control, propaganda and the power of Big Brother.
Meanwhile, Brave New World, written by Aldous Huxley portrays a future world in which human life is controlled through technology and conditioning. Society prioritises stability and happiness through humans whose individuality and emotions are suppressed. Again, not a million miles away from the world we live in.
Both are a good quick read, and I encourage you to read them if you haven’t already.
Whilst on a windswept walk on the beach, trying to avoid being sandblasted and sunburnt at the same time, it occurred to me that the world we are living in is probably more of a Huxlyan world than an Orwellian one and I will explain why.
We live in a world in which people are constantly trying to gain your/our attention. Social media, TV, in fact, anything on your device: they all want to get your attention by use of algorithms that look to exploit your interests – if you watch a video a second more than another one, it tests you out with more of those videos. And most worryingly, the more provocative the material, the more extreme the material, the more likely it is to grab your attention. Grabbing your attention is about metaphorically shouting the loudest, being the most extreme, it is about sensory overloading.
But our lives are complex, life is nuanced, you can’t say all you need to about an issue in a Tiktok video or a social media post. You also can’t rely on swift judgements: they need to be though over, contested, shared with others before coming to a conclusion.
When we were planning the lecture that Dame Maggie Pocock Adhern presented last term, we thought about how long it should be. An hour was thought too long, but I said we should expect of pupils to be able to concentrate for an hour. I sat at the front and looked around after 20mins and saw many of you starting to fidget. Perhaps even now after 10 minutes of listening to me you might be thinking about reaching for a device, something you might have been doing readily in your holidays.
My son, who is only 8, said to me numerous times during the holidays that he was bored. I said good! When you get bored, you start to think for yourself and start to do something interesting. If you don’t give yourself a chance to get bored, then where is the fertile ground that inspiration, creativity or even genius take root?
So my message to you this term is take your time and get bored. Embrace the boredom and don’t give in to being entertained by companies that are only interested in getting you to spend time on platforms so that they get advertising revenue. You should use your time better than doomscrolling.
It is only through these moments of boredom that you find the space to be inspired and start to be creative. It is only through boredom that you are likely to engage in something different this term, a new club or society, and in doing so, grow and learn. It is through that boredom that you get to process your thoughts and start to understand what is important in life. You might just surprise yourself with what you can achieve….
I often hear from my friends, I don’t have the time to do… exercise, reading, learning something new. I often ask them to look at their screen time statistics and say, there is all the time that you need.
So stop scrolling, start doing and try to do something for more than 30minutes without being distracted. Good luck and let me know how you get on.
Have a good 4-day week and aim to make it a good start to the term.
Thank you.
Now finally, as I noted earlier, there are not many more whole school assemblies this term, but there will be one next week – an exceptional assembly in which we will be announcing the new praefect time who will help to take over duties around the school whilst the M6th are on exam leave. I won’t give away an spoilers, other than to say that I look forward to seeing you next week.
Thank you.