{"id":392,"date":"2021-07-06T15:46:00","date_gmt":"2021-07-06T14:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whs-blogs.co.uk\/sports-blog\/?p=392"},"modified":"2023-01-11T09:42:12","modified_gmt":"2023-01-11T09:42:12","slug":"speech-day-the-year-that-was","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/whs-blogs.co.uk\/heads-blog\/2021\/07\/06\/speech-day-the-year-that-was\/","title":{"rendered":"Speech Day: The year that was"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Year That Was… and what a year that was, and I can tell you\u202fnow\u202fthat despite never having been a Kipling fan, for the first time his poetry is resonating with me. \u2018If you can keep your head whilst all about you\/Are losing theirs\u2019 suddenly feels less stuffy, late Victoriana irrelevance and more a scarily accurate job description for running a school during a pandemic.\u202f\u202f\u202f\u00a0

And so I hold up the year that\u202fwas 2020-21, and I examine it: I usually consider myself a decisive person, and yet\u202fI can\u2019t decide, at all, on examining this year, on any of the following: whether it\u2019s gone ludicrously quickly or painfully slowly; whether it\u2019s\u202fbeen the most unpredictable, adrenaline-filled year ever or the most uneventful slow-burner; or whether I\u2019ll remember it forever, or if it\u2019s already disappearing in a hazy blur;\u202fin short, whether it\u2019s been too\u202fmuch\u202for too\u202flittle;\u202fand I think of\u202fWordsworth\u2019s phrase,\u202fthat the world is too much with us, and I ask, is it? And I really mean that: is it? Rarely have we seen so little of the world, from staying at home entirely (and\u202fthe majority of\u202fyou will of course still be working from home), to going to school to home and back again \u2013 and for those of us who live ten minutes from school, that\u2019s not a big radius of experience \u2013\u202fbut never, too, have the happenings in the world had so much impact on how we live our lives, certainly not those of us born after 1945. Which is\u202fthe vast majority of\u202fthe people I work with and for, for obvious reasons. And\u202fso\u202flooking back is discombobulating, it leaves us reeling somewhat \u2013 and I know that the feeling of being untethered, of not knowing how you\u2019re feeling or where things should be, has rocked us all and will take some time to work itself round. I started the year in assembly with a notion of which Obama\u202fis fond, and which he used to talk about when considering the challenges of\u202fleadership in particular: and that is developing the ability to hold the tension of opposites; acknowledging the truth of more than one thing being the\u202fcase, and\u202fholding\u202fboth of them\u202fin a harmonious tension with each other. Being comfortable with uncertainty, with the not-knowingness, is a skill we\u2019re losing as a society and I think it\u2019s the idea which will best see us through as we adjust to what may, or may not, have happened to us, and what may, or may not, be coming next.\u202f\u202f\u202f\u00a0

Because\u202fof course\u202fschools are all about unknowingness and uncertainty, about holding the tension of opposites. Not because we want our students to be hesitant, or to be uncertain in their values and\u202fsense of who they are, not at all. But because to know that you don\u2019t yet\u202fknow,\u202fthat\u202fyou won\u2019t EVER fully know, is to stay curious,\u202fand alive to ideas; to stay nuanced in your thinking, to chase the learning for its own sake and not for any narrow outcomes; to work together to find things out and\u202fbe inspired by each other\u2019s passions and successes, rather than obsessing about rankings and competition in a more negative sense; this is what great schools engender, and what we see here at WHS in spades.\u202fOf course\u202fthe stunning steam tower,\u202fstanding tall for a whole academic year now,\u00a0beautifully symbolises this approach; but so too of course do our students, who absolutely understand the joy of the endeavour to experience and understand more, as a life-long act of learning. These are young people who\u202ffor fun<\/em>\u202fengage in and publish real world data research,\u202f\u202fwho head up GDST-wide eco-climate lobby groups, who win international competitions in design and engineering, who give of their time and pocket money to make the lives of prisoners\u202fbetter, who write plays which have scripted readings by the National Theatre,\u202fwho\u202frow\u202fand tumble and play tennis and run steeplechase at national and international level, and who are always looking for more opportunity, more challenge.\u202f\u202f\u00a0

Our girls are phenomenal \u2013 they are absolutely on top of their\u202fgame\u202fand I have been so proud and awed by the way in which they have kept on finding ways to\u202fpursue\u202ftheir immense talents and passions, to the very\u202fhighest levels, throughout this crisis.\u202f\u202f\u202f\u00a0

And\u202fthis is why, looking back at the year\u202fthat was, I also become quite\u202fcross, if I’m honest,\u202fat some of the discourse around young people and what Generation Z can and cannot, or should and should not, lead on for\u00a0themselves,\u202f\u202fand\u202fwhether or not\u202fthey should\u202fbe listened to by those lucky enough to lead them.\u202fWhatever The Sunday Times might have to say about it, yawn, to me it\u2019s all about working together \u2013 parents and teachers\u202falongside the students \u2013\u202fto bring about meaningful change, whilst maintaining the broad and balanced education we know our girls have always benefitted from. As with everything, there is a balance to be struck here between innocence and experience,\u00a0wisdom\u202fand fresh thinking, and it is absolutely the case that this balance is being sought by all school leaders currently, whether in our local State primary partners, or up the hill at King\u2019s. I think and talk about it all the time, and was searching for the words to describe it to you, when I was emailed by one of our former Head Girls, the preternaturally mature and\u202fvisionary Priyanka Patel, just finishing as an LPC student at BPP and the Chair of their Youth Advisory Board;\u202fPriyanka was able to sum it up where I was not, and\u202fbeautifully\u202ftoo: she wrote,\u202f\u202f\u00a0

\u201cIt really is people like yourself who make the difference, by acting on the recognition\u202fthat the wisdom of your generation can be supported and enhanced by listening to and engaging\u202fwith the voice of ours.\u201d hear\u202fhear;\u202f\u202fand building on this sort of insight, the courage of another former Head Girl Ava Vakil, and our pride in our alumnae more generally has led us to set up a former head girls\u2019 advisory group, a board of impressive young women who\u202fwill be assisting us further in our bid to reflect, examine and improve the way in which we support and educate our amazing students.\u202fBut we also want the passion of Gen Z to be matched with genuine intellectual curiosity,\u202fwe want our young people to think broadly, to develop the skills to listen to those with whom they disagree, and learn from them, whether that looks like changing their own position slightly, or further developing their own arguments and opinions by hearing the alternative, or simply just learning to argue with articulate nuance despite feeling challenged or even dare I say it offended.\u202f\u202f\u00a0

We\u202fhave to\u202fbecome more comfortable with discomfort if we are fully to develop intellectually and emotionally, and in my\u202fmind\u202fit stands to reason that if we are going to stay true to our\u202fWimbledonian\u202fcommitment to the development of resilience, that\u202fhas to\u202fincorporate hearing views other than your own. And\u202fso\u202fin the new year you will hear much more on our new Civil Discourse programme, launching in September, and designed to provide opportunities to hear and respond to a\u202frange\u202fof ideas and voices, in a bid to combat the polarising nature of much of the discourse on social media and beyond.\u202f\u202f\u00a0

So\u202fwe haven\u2019t stood still during\u202fthis crisis, not at all.\u202f\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was the script of the main part of Fionnuala Kennedy\u2019s speech at Speech Day 2021<\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Year That Was… and what a year that was, and I can tell you\u202fnow\u202fthat despite never having been a Kipling fan, for the first time his poetry is resonating with me. \u2018If you can keep your head whilst all … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":393,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[53,49,52],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/whs-blogs.co.uk\/heads-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/whs-blogs.co.uk\/heads-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/whs-blogs.co.uk\/heads-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whs-blogs.co.uk\/heads-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whs-blogs.co.uk\/heads-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/whs-blogs.co.uk\/heads-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":412,"href":"http:\/\/whs-blogs.co.uk\/heads-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392\/revisions\/412"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whs-blogs.co.uk\/heads-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/whs-blogs.co.uk\/heads-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whs-blogs.co.uk\/heads-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/whs-blogs.co.uk\/heads-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}