Senior Reflections Week 13 December 2024

Dear parents,

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas……

The lights have been on the trees at school for a few weeks now, but this week has felt rather more festive with our annual Christmas jumper day on Wednesday, coinciding, as always, with a fantastic Christmas lunch with all the trimmings in place of the weekly roast dinner. This year, in order to develop and instil further house spirit with our five new houses in the senior school, we had our inaugural house day – with a range of activities for pupils from breaktime onwards. These were designed to encourage collaboration and creativity within the houses, and to generate some friendly rivalry between them; it included decorating classroom doors in the theme of Christmas films, fun relay games, a quiz and of course, singing Christmas songs. It was lovely to see your sons and daughters working well between the year groups as well as within their tutor groups to decorate their doors, stuff Rudolf’s antlers with balloons and score as many points as possible on the Christmas quiz. We all ended up in the hall with our communal singing of the five Christmas songs – and what a wonderful atmosphere it was. Your children were outstanding in their engagement, with the older ones really showing excellent leadership skills of the younger house members. Well done to our fabulous house captains, to all the heads of house for their leadership and my grateful thanks to Miss Bethan Rose, Deputy Head (Enrichment and Community) whose brainchild this was, and who organised the day so brilliantly.

Carol services and Christmas music

Today, we have been shuttling backwards and forward to St Leonard’s Church for our Christmas carol services. This year, with our new section structure in the senior school, we decided to stay closer to home and have carol services by section. I have much enjoyed all four of the services today, all brilliantly led by Rev Mark Close, with wonderful music provided by our talented musicians and ably directed by Mr Peter Tamblyn and Mr Matt Davies. The pupil readers in all sections have been brilliant, and it has been lovely to hear such enthusiastic congregational singing from everyone. I hope that they enjoyed this new style and rather more intimate service. It has also had the added bonus of taking out less time from lessons so they have had more time with their subject teachers than they normally would on Christmas carol service day.

It was lovely to share the junior school carol service here at school with parents on Tuesday afternoon. The junior school music is fantastic and we all enjoyed not only listening to the children, but also joining in the congregational singing. Well done to all the parents present, you made a lovely sound! A special thanks, also, to Mr Jonny Titchin, whose musical direction was wonderful.

Looking ahead to next week – we have the senior school Christmas concert on Tuesday evening. This promises to be a wonderful event and I hope to see many of you here to celebrate the end of term and to share in our wonderful musicians’ talents.

Mobile phone parental forum

We had a packed house yesterday evening for the forum looking at mobile phone use in school. It was incredibly helpful to reflect on the positive and negative impacts of mobile phone use for children and to think about how we can develop our policy going forward to ensure that we place pupil wellbeing at the heart of our decision making. Dr Rory Conn, a parent in the junior school and a child psychiatrist, helped us to understand the clinical impacts of social media and mobile phone use on the wellbeing and mental health of children and young people. Mr John Wood and Mr Mike Glanville, who are leading this important policy review, took the forum through some questions and the data from the survey which more than 570 parents responded to earlier on in the term. We are on track to share the policy with parents next term and we will continue to reflect carefully on this important topic.

After the stormy weather of the last two weekends, I hope that this weekend is rather calmer for you all as we look towards the final week of term and Christmas not far ahead.