Headmaster's Address - King's Day 2011

Welcome to King's Day 2011.  At a time of national and international upheaval, we have had a week of reassuring certainties – heroic failure in the men's finals at Wimbledon, trains unable to run because of extreme weather conditions (in this case too much sunshine), two old Etonians (Boris Johnson and David Cameron) at loggerheads over high-speed rail, pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge on or near the front of nearly every newspaper every day, and the latest gossip about Sarah Palin (still, we are led to believe, a serious candidate to be the first female president of the USA) somewhere in the middle pages.  The fact that journalists are still talking about Princess Beatrice's hat at the Royal Wedding is a reminder that the British public is inclined, at moments of national stress, to take refuge in the homely but bizarre habits of minor celebrities.  Anne Widdecombe dressing up as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz in one episode of Strictly Come Dancing raised the morale of half the nation and left the other half  speechless.  And by the way, how dare the Americans be so rude as to reject from the US version of X Factor Cheryl Cole who, as we all know, is a national treasure even if she speaks in an accent that is little understood west of Newcastle let alone further west on the other side of the Atlantic. 

The nation is under stress in all sorts of ways and it does not take Paul the Octopus, sadly now no more following his extraordinary feats in predicting the outcome of the last World Cup, to predict that we all have another tough year ahead.  In the world of education alone, the huge increase in the cost to the consumers of Higher Education is going to make many potential university students and their parents conduct a much more serious cost/benefit analysis, and will make schools like this take even greater care in matching the right person to the right course.  It is little wonder that many are now looking to universities in mainland Europe, which teach courses in English at a bargain basement price, as a possible alternative.  We may be facing a radical re-think of A levels and GCSEs although the Department for Education has little time at the moment, I imagine, to think beyond its rapidly developing Academy programme and the possible effects on the teaching profession of the proposed changes to pensions.

Before I move on to a particular theme for today, I want to welcome our preacher at the service later this morning.  He is Simon Keyes, and If the surname sounds vaguely familiar, I can confess and confirm that he is my brother, but that I did not invite him for that reason alone .  He runs the St Ethelburga's  Centre for Reconciliation and Peace in the centre of London.  It is an intriguing title for an organisation and I will not steal Simon's thunder by telling you about it now, but it does very important work locally in the City of London, nationally and internationally in trying to show people that there are important ways to resolve conflict that are based on a better understanding of who your supposed enemy is and why they see things very differently from you.

A few thank yous –

·         To all our good friends and neighbours at the Cathedral for a happy liaison during the year and for continuing to provide bellringing as a really interesting activity for our pupils.   The Cathedral Organist and Master of Choristers, Adrian Lucas, is moving on to other things at the end of this year.  We are hugely indebted to him for the positive cooperation over the last 15 years, during which he has been in post,that the school has had with those who look after our pupils in their role as choristers.  As a parent of former King's pupils he knows us well and has always gone the extra mile to keep our connection strong.

·         To the Parents' Committee, very ably led by Rob Richards, for some great social events and, most recently, very welcome refreshments in the school gardens at the end of the whole school charity walk from Upton to Worcester.

·         To our friends at Bishop Perowne Cof E College with whom we continue to develop a range of interesting initiatives.

·         To all the other partners with whom we have worked closely this year: the University of Worcester, the Chamber of Commerce, local Primary Schools, businesses, charities, Worcester Rugby, Cricket and Football Clubs and other sporting organisations, the Swan Theatre and the Malvern Theatres.

·         To all those parents and former pupils who have given their time and expertise to assist with interviews, careers events, conferences and advice,  the library, sporting activities, the SWAP Shop and in many other informal ways.

·         To all the staff at King's, in their different roles, who always go the extra mile and are so proud of the achievements of the pupils in their care.

 

We say farewell to a number of staff this year:

To Caroline and John Roslington who have built up run the school archive so effectively; to Pauline Wright and Pauline Baum, Assistant Librarian and Librarian who moved with the Library from the Edgar Tower to its new premises and have done so much to establish it effectively there.

 

From the Biology department to Lauren Lawson-Pratt who has galvanised girls rowing at King's having been a former pupil and highly accomplished oarswoman herself; from the Art Department, to Richard Gilbert who now goes to run his own Art Department at a local school; from the English Department to Katie Adam who has most recently been Second in Department and Chorister Tutor;  from Religious Studies to Daniel Jones who has also run Fencing and our bellringing activities and now goes to be Chaplain at St Peter's School in York; from the Geography Department to Daniel Orr who has been particularly involved in sport and in the CCF, and to Lynda Ghaye, formerly Senior Tutor.  They have all been wholehearted and selfless contributors to King's and we wish them well for the future.  I invite you to show your appreciation now.

 

And we say farewell to Sue Hincks, Senior Deputy Head who richly deserves her promotion to be Head of the Girls' Division of Bolton School.  She came in 2004 as part of the senior team and then became the first woman to hold the role of what used to be (but for obvious reasons could no longer be called) Second Master, and is now called Senior Deputy.  Sue will be remembered by her colleagues for her intelligence, meticulous organisation, extraordinary capacity for hard work, generosity with her time and patience in assisting with a whole range of personal and professional concerns, and readiness to sing, dance or put on black leather in a staff panto.  She will be remembered by those whom she has taught as a dynamic, unconventional and caring teacher and by the school as a whole as someone who can express her displeasure in no uncertain terms from the stage in College Hall at one moment and at another spend hours trying to find the best way round a pastoral difficulty.  She will be a great Headteacher and we are deeply grateful for the many ways in which she has taken King's forward in the last seven years.  She will be presenting the prizes later but I would like you to show your appreciation to her now.

 

A man speaks frantically to the duty doctor on the phone: "My wife is pregnant, and her contractions are only two minutes apart!"
"Is this her first child?" the doctor queries.
"No, you idiot!" the man shouts. "This is her husband!"

There must be some reason why variations on "A man/stroke woman went to the doctor…"  jokes are up at the top of the league table of joke genres along with "How many Xs does it take to change a lightbulb" and "A man walked into a pub.." jokes.  I suspect it is because we are a nation that is a little bit obsessed with health issues.  This theme comes to mind from a chance reading of the 1942 King's School prospectus which the Archivists passed my way in case it was of interest.  The first sentence says: "The school stands in its own grounds in College Green in one of the healthiest parts of Worcester…".  We can all  start to speculate about what the unhealthy parts of Worcester might be.  No time for that now, but suggestions on a postcard please.  The King's School was not always in such a healthy environment.  In 1636, to annoy the bishop, the Dean moved the school out of College Hall (which was then its only building) and into the chapel of the Charnel House next to the Bishop's Palace and the place where the bishop stored his hay.   The Dean's excuse was that a consecrated building was better used as a school than a hay barn.   The bishop retorted that "The swearing and lying of nearly 200 boys was  a greater profanation than storing hay in it."  The room was only half the size of College Hall and the smell from the bones in the crypt below was so awful that the school was soon moved back into College Hall.  We are aware that we are privileged to have our school on what is a beautiful, and, yes, given that we are right in the heart of the city, healthy location.  But that is not quite the sort of health I want to talk about today.  We have been particularly committed to the development of facilities to do with sport this year with a new astroturf pitch, a new pavilion, soon a very fine new boathouse and a sports and performing arts centre at the heart of our plans.  But that is not all that I have in mind either.

A young woman went to her doctor complaining of pain.
"Where are you hurting?" asked the doctor.
"You have to help me, I hurt all over", said the woman.
"What do you mean, all over?" asked the doctor, "be a little more specific."

The woman touched her right knee with her index finger and yelled, "Ow, that hurts." Then she touched her left cheek and again yelled, "Ouch! That hurts, too." Then she touched her right earlobe, "Ow, even THAT hurts", she cried.

The doctor checked her thoughtfully for a moment and told her his diagnosis, "You have a broken finger."

Good health is easy to recognise but ill-health can be hard to diagnose.  That is why prevention is better than cure, as they say. 

When each year at reunion dinner for the Old Vigornians (that is former pupils of the school) I am asked to respond to a toast to the health of the King's School, I tend to do so in terms of outlining in different ways the priorities and principles dear to us that underpin what we do and help to guarantee, I hope, that this school will be playing just as important a part in Worcester in decades and even, governments permitting, centuries to come.  I see this in terms of five key qualities of a truly healthy community which the school, and that really means the staff and pupils, would always exhibit or at the very least aspire to exhibit :

Intellectual curiosity; a commitment to be one community; a spirit of service; confidence in playing an active role in the wider world, and, lastly, [spirituality].  This talk is not a review of the year (you can find that well summarised in the booklets you have in your hands) but let me illustrate briefly how what we do gives some evidence of our health as an institution.

We value intellectual curiosity by trying increasingly to move lessons away from the giving and receiving of information and ideas and towards active debate based on individual research; at the same time by urging our pupils to aspire to the highest grades in public exams as last year's GCSE and A level groups did so impressively, and by taking up activities that are both mentally stretching and fun.  Our extraordinary success in getting teams to the national finals of the National Maths Team Challenge in six of the last seven years is that this type of extra-curricular subject activity regularly takes place for much larger numbers in school; the fact that our senior and junior quiz teams reached regional and national finals respectively is based on the inter-form and inter-house quizzes that happen in lunchtimes in school; our robot design and programming team reached qualified for the Open European Championship because they enjoyed their lunchtime club activity enough to want to enter a national competition in which they were runners up.  The 4x4 Challenge team has just reached the national finals in the same way.  But it is not just a matter of competition.  There is a wealth of creative or problem-solving intellectual activity on offer here which we would like even more pupils to engage with.

The strongest evidence of our commitment to be a strong community comes, I feel, from the example set by senior pupils here.  They give this example to those in younger years by their energy and enterprise but also by the natural way in which they form respectful relationships with themselves and adults here, their readiness to lead, manage, advise and help younger pupils and by their evident pride in and enjoyment of each other's successes.  Our monitors, under the excellent leadership of Russell Whitehouse, have, as one would hope, led the way in this respect this year, as have the Heads of House.  We have recently awarded House and Form prizes to those who have proved themselves to be boys and girls who have a gift, and are prepared to use it, for encouraging others, pulling them together as a group and being uncomplicated friends to as many people as possible.

Commitment to service is sometimes a thing that is seen in whole groups at a time: the whole Lower Sixth putting on a summer party for children from a local special school or the whole Upper Sixth putting on an entertainment and Christmas tea for elderly people in Worcester.  Or it is something done by individuals: one to one with a child in a local primary school; helping the Rotary Club with events in Worcester or working in a local charity shop, for instance.  It is a key part of the Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme that such large numbers here take up; it is at the heart of all our charitable work which has led this year to contributions to more than fifty different charities.  More than 1500 pupils, staff, parents and friends of the school walking from Upton on Severn to Worcester on the May Bank Holiday and raising upwards of £18,000 for a range of charities was one type of public community statement of service.  What we want most, however, is to instil that spirit of service in the minds and hearts of everyone here so that it becomes a habit for life.  It is no surpise, then, that this is a frequent theme of assemblies.

Confidence to play an active role in the world is an extension of service in one way, but it is also being equipped with a range of skills and experiences which enable you to be confident in yourself, and therefore comfortable in your own skin and therefore able to focus other people rather than on yourself.  I told you last year of the three key words that sum up what we want our pupils to be in adult life, and these are "confident, fulfilled and unselfish".  At an event in London earlier this year, held in the engine room beneath Tower Bridge, I was talking to a gathering of former pupils who live and work in or near London.  In seeking their support, both in terms of goodwill and money, I tried to establish a case for why the idea of former pupils supporting bursary funding in their old school, if it is a good independent school which is doing its job really well, is a valid form of giving to charity.  A potted history of King's, written in 1918, was bold enough to say even then "What an asset this ancient school is to the city, county and Diocese of Worcester".  There are many much more pressing needs in the world but a place that sends on into society each year about 140 young people who are nearly all well balanced, confident, public spirited young men and women who have a firm set of values a strong sense of justice, courage to stand out from the herd and the ability to lead, is doing something worth supporting, and if all 500 or so of the leading independent schools are doing the same, which is not to say that a great many maintained schools are not doing this too, then that is a good thing for this country.  Confidence gained through sport, music, drama, Art, CCF, language exchanges, Comenius trips, work experience, Young Enterprise, journalism, DofE, adventurous activities and trips, debating and a host of other activities gives you a degree of self-esteem that makes it less likely that you will be self-obsessed and more likely to turn your attention outside yourself.  In Benjamin's Britten's Noyes Fludde via Guys and Dolls, a Dance Showcase, a music tour to the south of France and a Foundation Concert for all our three schools in this cathedral, to recent productions of melodrama and Oliver Twist and many other such events along the way, hundreds of our pupils have performed confidently to audiences this year.  You will see today in exhibitions the creative flair of our artists and design and technology students.  Please take time to read in the booklet what so many of our pupils have accomplished in all these areas.  We are very proud this year to have received an award which makes us the UK's first centre for excellence in Young Enterprise, and to have been selected again by the Rank Foundation for one of their leadership awards and by the local Rotary Club as a place from which to offer potential leaders for development.  In purely material terms, our sporting facilities have had a huge boost this year with the completion of an all-weather pitch, a new pavilion on the playing fields, and, by the end of this year, we hope, a new boathouse. 

So to summarise: intellectual curiosity, commitment to be a strong community, commitment to service, confidence to play an active role in the world. My fifth and last symptom of health is spiritual awareness both in a religious sense for all those who have found that dimension in life, but also in the ability to step back and recognise that there is a great deal more to life than getting and spending, money, possessions and all the comforts of the privileged way of life that comes from winning the lottery of being citizens of a developed, wealthy, peaceful country.  We have been fortunate this year to have a large number of speakers in assemblies and other gatherings who have raised our sights above the ordinary.   A Crematorium in Scotland, it is reported, has installed a red light that flashes a warning to the clergyman taking the service if a funeral has lasted more than 20 minutes; if it goes on even longer, staff are instructed to use hand signals to bring things to a close.  In our busy day-school days, we do try to have times when we are not hurrying on the next event with our eyes down.  I welcome particularly the fact this year that so many younger pupils have attended communion services in the cathedral crypt, a timeless place of worship and prayer that goes back almost 1000 years, that we have a thriving Christian Union  and that philosophical debate is an established activity.

So much for a healthy community.  Earlier in the year, I used three different sounds to sum up for some of our Junior School children what it is to be a healthy and balanced person.  If the Chaplain, as he did two weeks ago, can get away with playing boisterous ball games in the cathedral choir, I think I can be permitted a little unconventional noise.  First [----------] the stadium horn – a symbol of self-discipline, punctuality,  order, respecting rules and being reliable.  Second [------------] the thunder tube, representing adventure,  creativity and enterprise, and lastly a harder noise to make and less dramatic, but as it grows it shuts out all the other distractions around [-------------] representing the spiritual dimension, the value of  reflection, meditation and prayer.   Philosophers and classicist among will recognise this idea as coming from Plato's Republic, written 2,400 years ago but it is no less true now that a happy life is one which holds self-discipline, adventure and spirituality in a proper balance.   This is probably in contrast to the notion of being "free-living" which I read about this week.  Apparently we are no longer meant to refer to our cats and dogs as "pets" – they are "companion animals".  And wild animals are  "free-living" .  If you see that phrase describing your own child in a school report, you will know now that they are not quite achieving the balance of which I speak.

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I offer my very best wishes to those who are leaving us to go to other schools and colleges.  My final words touch on those who have just finished their A levels and leave us today.  Every year brings a number of anniversaries.  This last year it has been 50 years of Coronation St, 60 years of the Archers and 70 years of Bob Dylan.  It may have escaped your notice, however, that it is also the 50th anniversary of supermarionation.  What on earth is that, you may ask (if you are not a child of the 60s)? It is action-adventure puppetry: Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (it has always struck me as strange that the world should have been under serious threat from what always looked like over-sized polo mints) and Stingray with my personal hero Troy Tempest.  How we ever believed in these superheroes when it was so easy to see that they were being manipulated by strings, I cannot imagine.  And that is my point.  Captain Scarlet may have looked like someone who was ready to save the world, but if his puppet master went for a cup of tea, he was just a heap on the floor.  My wish for all of you who leave today is simply this: that you will move on confidently from King's to do great things and to make a difference, each as a superhero in your own way with no strings attached.