A time of change

I am typing this in the knowledge that any moment now our new website will, after two years planning, finally see the light of day. I hope parents and pupils, past, present and future, will think it worth the wait and will find that it is a fair reflection of our busy school and allows the information within to be easily reached. As we talk of our new website as a contemporary and dynamic window on the world and say goodbye to a familiar but tired previous version one cannot help but reflect on the passage of time and the need for change. I am sure that when our old website first appeared it was greeted with the same enthusiasm as I hope this will be now, but, to steal Lampedusa’s famous quotation, ‘if we want things to stay as they are, then things are going to have to change.’ It is interesting to note that those institutions that stand the test of time, and so seem at first to represent tradition and continuity, almost always have an impressive inbuilt capacity to change whether that be the British Monarchy, venerable political parties, successful sports teams (not a moment to mention English Rugby) or great restaurants. And so it is with schools. Our new website comes at the start of a year when we have opened a new boarding house, two new Chemistry labs and an outdoor learning space, when we have launched an entirely new 6th form curriculum route, the IBCP (the first independent school in the UK to do so) and we welcome new Heads of English, Maths, Physics, Economics and Games, as well as our new Head of Junior School, Mrs Linda Dennis. But it is not out with the old and in with the new – these changes allow us to maintain the values and ethos established back at our foundation in 1921 and they will be stronger for doing so. Our new website is an important part of these changes, but I am sure that in five years it will be all change once again – and it must be, for only by internal renewal do we deserve to survive – ask The Doctor.