It has been very uplifting to spend time with pupils across both sites this week, as we begin a new calendar year, and a new school term. I have been popping in and out of lessons at both the Pre-Prep & Prep this week (as I often do) taking the temperature so to speak and observing what it is that pupils have been up to. I always find this a very joyful endeavour! I caught snippets of an excellent Year 5 philosophy lesson on the nature and quality of ethics, I was as enthralled as the boys in a Year 6 engineering lesson as they learnt about structural mechanics (and how the very first “robots” were designed and operated) and I was delighted to see boys in a Year 3 maths lessons whizzing through an exciting array of number problems involving all four operations. I also very much enjoyed reading a tale about ‘the worst princess’ to the boys and girls in Year 1. At the end of it, we agreed that sometimes book titles can be misleading. Once the story was over and we had reflected upon what was really going on in the book, the Year 1 boys and girls realised that on occasion what might have seemed like the worst sort of behaviour by some can actually turn out to be the best sort of behaviour by others. The story was ultimately about taking risks, and standing up for what you believe in. I was pretty glad to note that the moral compass of the pupils in Year 1 is set to a very clear emotional true north!
Tim Smith
Headmaster
Prep
Pre-Prep
