At the end of the first week of school in January 2015, I penned my very first Bulletin as Headmaster of our wonderful school. This one is number 346 and is my last!
We had a different name back then (we changed it to Hampton Pre-Prep & Prep in 2016), the uniform was different, and both the Pre-Prep and Prep sites looked physically substantially different from how they are today, thank heavens! No more moving buckets about to catch the drips in the Kindergarten when it rained, and the prefabricated buildings on the Prep site, erected sometime in the 1980s and long since past their sell-by date, have been replaced by the staff car park.
From our newer prefabs, for about twelve months after I started, we sat surrounded by a moat of mud watching the new Prep building emerge brick by brick from the plot on the Prep school site, until the joyous day we were finally able to move in. I remember that well. It was a Friday, and colleagues willingly came in over that weekend to help set everything up for the Monday morning… only to arrive at school and receive a phone call from the Independent Schools Inspectorate (which, in fairness, we had more or less been expecting) alerting us to the fact that our scheduled inspection would begin the very next day.
It has been non-stop fun and games here ever since, and I can honestly say the last eleven years have been the most personally invigorating, the most professionally rewarding and, above all, the most transformative in terms of what I currently believe constitutes a joyful, successful educational experience for young learners. I could not have wished to begin my first Headship in a more fitting school.
According to one or two colleagues here, I am far too old to be bandying about colloquially age-inappropriate language such as the word “vibe” but I can reassure you, the vibe here eleven years ago was as warm, kind and academically purposeful as it remains today, and of that I am immensely grateful: to my colleagues, to you as parents of the boys and girls here across both Pre-Prep & Prep, and of course to the pupils themselves.
I shall send my customary end-of-term letter to all parents on Friday next week, but I sign off from the authorship of the Bulletins now, happy and proud of the school we are, and 100% confident that an even brighter future is yet to come! I shall be following the continued success of the school very closely.
