Dec 11

Leaving with no regrets: the positive discipline of looking forward

I am now on the verge of departing St Mary’s Calne, and the past few days have been full of very moving occasions in which I have been able to say farewell, and in which members of the community have been able to say farewell to me (although I do point out that Australia is not actually that far away, and even less far electronically!). Farewells are important, though, and as part of this process I was interviewed last week by one of my Year 12 students – a budding journalist who also edits the school student magazine. One of the questions she asked me was whether I had any regrets about my time as Head of my current school. I considered her question and then answered truthfully that I didn’t: the point about regrets is that it is far too easy to waste time indulging in them. The time that we have on this planet is too precious to fritter away in thinking about what we could or should have done differently, and wishing that we could change something that cannot or should not be changed.

The results of a recent British Heart Foundation survey showed that the average UK citizen spends two hours 15 minutes a week regretting what he or she has or hasn’t done in life. The top ten of these regrets include not travelling enough and seeing more of the world, not keeping in touch with more friends from the past, and not exercising enough. The British Heart Foundation had run the survey to help promote their Overseas Fundraising Challenge, so the implicit encouragement to stop regretting and get on with putting these missing elements right – by travelling, exercising and being with friends – was a pleasantly convenient outcome for them. The significance of their research, however, is more wide-ranging: over two hours of waking time a week is a hefty period of time just to be regretting past action or inaction, especially as it is a fair guess that the associated feelings (probably similar to despondency) will last for longer than just two hours. Think what else you could do with those two or more hours a week; think what you could achieve if you set your mind to not having any regrets, but instead just moving forwards.

Having no regrets is a discipline; it is not easy, nor should it be an excuse for passing off bad behaviour – knowing that you must not regret something should not permit you to do something that you know in advance will be the wrong thing to do. When I speak to senior pupils on how to prepare to maximise their future choices, I say to them that they need to approach the future with positivity and “relentless optimism”. They can create their future; they will create their future to their liking and for the good of others if they are determined to move forwards, onwards, upwards, and leave their regrets behind.

It is only a few hours now until I leave St Mary’s Calne and travel to Australia to take up the Headship of Ascham School in Sydney. And although it is hard to leave a super school with super girls, I go in the spirit of adventure and of looking forward to an great new community. No regrets. Just wonderfully relentless optimism.

 

Dec 08

How do we protect our children from this rising tide of self-harm?

The BBC reported earlier this week that calls to ChildLine about self-harm had risen by 68% compared to last year, and this is a statistic that should alarm us. Most of the calls were from girls, and the age of many of the callers on this subject had dropped: self-harm has now become a leading issue amongst 14-year olds. All of this points to what Sue Minto, Head of ChildLine concluded: “It seems the pressures facing children and young people – particularly girls – are increasing at such a rate that some of them see these drastic measures as the only answer to their problems.”

Self-harm is an entirely alien concept to many parents, who find it almost inconceivable to think that their children might be taking a sharp object to a part of their body and physically harming themselves. It is, however, a very real – and a very worrying – phenomenon. Contrary to many of the myths that circulate about self-harm, this process is not usually about seeking attention. It is usually done in secret, and while it is a cry for help – a kind of primal scream that says that a child is not coping with the pressures she or he is facing – it is a silent cry, as the child cannot work out how to communicate the overwhelming nature of the feelings, thoughts and emotions that are pressing down and suffocating their power of reason and their ability to cope with life.

Life now is harder than ever before for our young people. Modern technology has brought a barrage of information, opinions and pressures, and the almost impossibly quantifiable nature of these means that young people can struggle to see a framework and structure within which to order their understanding of the world. Society often appears to be operating in a moral vacuum; even if young people hear strong moral voices from home and from school, these can be so at odds with what they see around them that they can become powerfully confused. Young people are bombarded, relentlessly, with contradictory messages that often attack the core of their being. It is little wonder that they can find it hard to cope.

If children – or adults, for that matter – self-harm, they need proper, supervised, psychological support. They have suppressed a protective inner barrier, and broken a human taboo, straying towards self-destruction rather than the drive towards self-preservation which keeps us all intact. They need help to resurrect this barrier and re-form around them the buffers and cushions that protect us all from the pain of raw exposure. With help, they will be able to do this and will become stronger and more resilient as a result.

But before it gets this far, families and schools – and all of us – can and should do something else: we need to build the resilience of our young people. We need to tell them, loud and clear, and again and again, that they have the capacity to make their own way in the world, that if they believe they can, they will, that they do not have to do it all, and they certainly do not have to do it now. They need to hear us say that they have the power within them to rise above the noise of society and identify what really matters – to shed the dross and concentrate on the strong values that unite us all. They need to hear that we are with them, and that we are there for them, even as they carve out their own unique path. We need to allow them to develop their own resilience and their own wisdom.

When we do all of this, our young people will be well-prepared for life in this imperfect society of ours.

 

 

Dec 05

Fidelis et Fortis

‘FIdleis et Fortis’ is the motto of James Gillespie’s High School, in Edinburgh, where I was a pupil for the last 4 and a half years of my secondary schooling. These were formative years but in common with many young people at the time, I know that I did not appreciate enough the influence that the school had on me and on my future life and career. This has been preying on my mind recently, however – no doubt something to do with the sense of tying up loose ends before setting off to move halfway round the planet – and on an impulse I phoned the school a few weeks ago and asked if I could come to visit while I was in Edinburgh last week. I went further, in fact; I explained what I do now in my life and what some of my journey had been, and I offered to help out in some way when I came to visit, if this was deemed desirable.

And so it was that I found myself speaking to a large group of senior pupils on how to maximise their chances of getting into the university of their choice, and to a large group of staff, including staff from nearby schools, on ‘Inspiring Leadership in the 21st Century’. I also spent two hours with the Head, discussing school leadership in general and sharing good practice. It felt as though I was giving back; it was my privilege to have done so. Moreover, it was a pleasure – the students were kind, respectful and at ease with adults, and I hope that my current students at Calne will have the opportunity to encounter them at some point in the future. The staff were great too!

The school was a little different from how I remembered it (not surprising, bearing in mind that I left in 1988) – there was no school uniform, for instance, and it is now a designated Gaelic school for Edinburgh (although English remains the language of instruction). It is about to undergo significant change, however, as it is to be rebuilt over the next 2 years – a massive project costing tens of millions of pounds. The feel and essence, however, seemed to me to be the same; at any rate, it felt familiar.

Interestingly, the Head – an experienced Head who moved to Gillespie’s at the beginning of 2012 – commented that his perception was that the community was one which was not afraid to think critically and to challenge appropriately, in the spirit of ensuring social justice. ‘Moral purpose’ was a phrase that resonated. It often takes people who still retain an outsider’s perspective to speak the truth about organisations, and this was a pleasing truth to hear.

The experience reminded me again – as if I needed reminding! – how important our schools are in forming our young people. It also reminded me to be grateful. School days – contrary to popular expectation – may not always be the happiest days of our lives, nor are they (or should they be) the easiest, but schools matter because they complement and accentuate the work of parents and help guide us through these days and these years; they challenge us, influence us, and help us to grow. They are staffed by people who have committed themselves to leadership – to leading the next generation and to leading the change we need to see in the world. We should all be grateful to these people.

So … thank you, James Gillespie’s High School, for helping me to grow into the person I have become. I will seek to repay the debt I owe you.

 

Dec 02

Dr Livingstone, I presume …

On Friday I returned from Edinburgh, where I met with some recent leavers from my current school, all now studying at Edinburgh University. It was a super occasion, and it was wonderful to see them enjoying student life – which includes studying very hard, of course! I had half an hour to spare between meetings, and I thought that I would use the opportunity to pop into the National Museum on Chambers Street; when I arrived, I discovered that one of their main current exhibitions was a reflection on the life of the great explorer and missionary, Dr David Livingstone, and I headed straight there.

David Livingstone was born in 1813, which makes 2013 the bicentenary of his birth. I knew this already, of course, because (as I mentioned in a blog just over a year ago), one of our older old girls from St Mary’s Calne, Belinda Hodge, has been busy for the past year galvanising support for children in Livingstone, Zambia, where some of our current pupils are going to help build a school next year – all part of the enduring legacy that Dr Livingstone left behind him. This anniversary was the reason for the exhibition, and it was fascinating – as indeed was the man himself.

Dr Livingstone was not only an explorer and a missionary; he was a great innovator and a medical doctor. Moreover, he was an acute observer of human beings, and appears to have had characteristics which endeared him to those he met, and led them to laud him: throughout Africa, towns and streets are named after him. His organisation and leadership may have been chaotic at times – his missions were not at all successful, and he did in fact appear to be lost when Henry Morton Stanley, sent out by the New York Herald to look for him, met him on the shores of Lake Tanganyika on 10th November 1871, and uttered those now immortal words – but he genuinely cared for those he met. He uncovered some of the horrors of the slave trade, and he described human trafficking as “this open sore upon the world”. He contributed to making a difference in this respect. He died in 1873 – the exact same year that St Mary’s Calne was founded, and only a few years before my new school, Ascham, was founded in Australia.

And then I saw one of his quotes, emblazoned on a banner, prominent in the exhibition. It struck an immense chord – and reinforced for me how important it is that we enrich ourselves by dipping into exhibitions about the lives of great people of a different age. The quote said this:

“I am prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward.”

As I make my final preparations to leave the shores of the UK to head to Australia, and as my students prepare to go to interviews for university places, and as the leavers at Ascham await their HSC results and look ahead to their futures, it is incumbent upon us all to remember that the advances in understanding that we have made a human race over the past centuries have all happened because people like Dr David Livingstone were prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward.

We must all go forward; it is our duty to do so. And as we do, not only do we make the most of our lives, but we create a better life for those who follow us, now and in the future.

 

Nov 28

Kitty Wilkinson, the Saint of the Slums: remembering our pioneering women

I very much enjoyed my visit last week to Liverpool, to attend our annual Girls’ Schools Association Heads’ conference, and I took the opportunity to discover a little more of the history of a city that was once one of the UK’s most important ports. (Actually, it still is – it is one of the few deep water ports in the UK, and so therefore a major hub for container traffic, especially to the United States and Canada.) As ever, however, I was drawn to the history of significant women in the area, and it was with this in mind that I came across the history of Kitty Wilkinson.

Kitty Wilkinson was born in 1786 in Londonderry and came to Liverpool as an immigrant in 1795. Her life was – as we might expect – a hard one, with time spent in a Lancashire mill from the age of 11 to 18, after which time she returned to Liverpool and worked in service until she married, had two children, was widowed and remarried. In 1832, during a cholera epidemic, she had the only boiler in the neighbourhood, and so she turned her house into a washhouse, allowing her neighbours to boil wash and thereby disinfect their bedding, which was the only way to kill the disease. Her actions brought her to the attention of the District Superintendent, and she was praised for her foresight and practical response to the epidemic. She saved many, many lives, and in the process educated many families about public health. After the epidemic, in 1842, she helped set up the first public washhouse in the country, the Public Baths and Wash House in Frederick Street, which she ran. She died on 11th November 1860, and is buried in St James’ cemetery in Liverpool. A statue of her was unveiled this September in St George’s Hall – the first woman to be honoured in this way.

The story of Kitty reminds us of two important elements in our history which we forget at our peril. First, it is a reminder that we have come a long way in public health and living conditions in a short period of time. Kitty’s story dates from less than 200 years ago, and in practice this is only a few generations back from where we are now. It was Kitty’s great, great, great niece who unveiled her statue two months ago; the family history of Kitty lives on, and we should not forget that it was only a short time ago that life was much more perilous than it is now – nor forget to wonder at the progress we have made as a human race in this time.

Second, it reminds us that women were at the heart of the community in our history – just as they are now. Women in 1832 may not have had the vote, nor been able to own property, nor had many of the rights they have now, but they were instrumental in leading and making things happen. Women led from the front, and our only shame is that it has taken us so long to recognise this. Kitty Wilkinson was a pioneer in the realm of public health; women throughout the ages have been pioneers. We owe Kitty and women like her a debt of gratitude.

 

Nov 24

Exposing reality: the Kardashian Kollection

I don’t normally read Reveal magazine, but I was tipped off last week that I was quoted in it, so I made a point of picking up a copy. Inside, I found their take on the new collection of clothes at high street store Dorothy Perkins, apparently designed by – and certainly promoted by – the Kardashian sisters, who are stars of a US reality TV series. It was a photo of Kim Kardashian in her underwear which graced the cover of that edition of Zoo magazine earlier this year, about which I said that it represented “almost everything that is wrong with Western society today”, combining as it did the toxic elements of our celebrity and sexualised culture. These comments zipped around the world, indicating through the controversy that they generated just how challenged we are by these pressures on young people.

This clothing collection – or Kollection (Kollektion, even?) – has received extensive press coverage over the past couple of weeks, which is the sign of a successful PR campaign on the part of Dorothy Perkins. Meantime, the appearance of the collection raises further questions about role models for girls and women, and whether or not we are in a healthy place on this one. It is interesting to read the statements of the Kardashian sisters, reported in several media, stressing that they are all different shapes and sizes, and that their collection therefore reflects this, and is suitable for ‘real women’. If you look at the clothes themselves, you may disagree – “tarty” (not my words) is how they have been described. In fact, it is hard not to feel that young women are simply being hoodwinked further into buying clothes – a commercial activity from which the Kardashian sisters and their backers will undoubtedly benefit.

Not all is lost, however. The editor of Reveal magazine, Jane Ennis, begins her editorial with the words: “Do not believe the Kardashian hype”. She points out that rather than lauding Kim Kardashian as an “ambassador for normal-shaped women”, we should remember that there is “nothing normal about this woman, her family or her body”. She points to her personal £22 million fortune and her unusual shape: “Most people with her sized bottom don’t have her tiny waist, long toned legs, perfect bust and chiselled features”.

A word of warning for us all lies in Ms Ennis’ final words: “Don’t be fooled. Whatever Kim or her publicity machine says, she is just another unattainable icon being dangled before us who we have no chance of emulating. Buy her dresses if they suit you. Why not? But please realise that she is the champion of clever marketing – not plus-size girls.”

This is Positive Image month. Let the wool fall from over our eyes. And if the editor of one of our women’s magazines is telling us this too, then maybe there is hope for all of us yet.

 

Nov 20

Why being in the ‘cool’ group is far from ‘cool’

This week I have been attending the annual Girls’ Schools Association Heads’ conference, which this year is in Liverpool, and – as ever – it has been a great opportunity to reflect on wider issues concerning the education and development of girls. The speakers have been stimulating, and none more so than Professor Carrie Paechter, who spoke on Monday about the dynamics between girls, and how these could affect their wellbeing. Her comments were reported widely in the press; she said that research has shown that sociable and apparently successful girls were often not as happy as we might imagine them to be – the pressure on them to be ‘perfect’ undid any perceived advantage or status they might seem to have. It is in fact entirely untrue that it is ‘cool’ to be ‘cool’.

I agree entirely – and said as much in the Daily Mail, in one of the pieces where Professor Paechter was quoted. It is a complete myth that being part of a clique – even one that appears to be desired by other girls – is a route to happiness. This myth is fed by teenage Hollywood films and our cult of celebrity, which centres on the Queen Bee and her entourage. Life around a Queen Bee looks good from the outside – it looks glamorous and ‘happening’ but on scratching the surface, very quickly we realise what underpins these relationships: insecurity, a fear of rejection, and a deep worry that favoured members of the group will drop out of favour and lose their place. It is no wonder that such cliques foster unhealthy competition, unkindness, and even cruelty. The relationships are essentially dysfunctional and harmful.

You will recognise the description of this kind of girl-girl relationship, for it is widely accepted that girls can be, and are, mean to one another in groups. Ponder for a moment on how we have come to a point in our society where we find this kind of behaviour by girls both admirable and repugnant – where, arguably, society lauds and encourages it in order to be able to say, with mock piety, that girls can’t get on with other girls …

In fact, as Professor Paecheter pointed out, girls are perfectly able to get on with one another, and from my own experience as the Head of a girls’ school, I can testify to the amazing depth of lifelong friendships that emerge from the crucible of teenagehood. Meanness and cruelty are not inevitable in female friendships, and it is harmful to girls to suggest that they are. Of course girls need structure and guidance in their friendship groupings – what young person doesn’t? Schools can help by creating strong structures to support these groupings – a clear ethos that everyone is equal, and that individual differences are valued, and practical steps such as ensuring that teachers, not pupils, decide who they will sit and work with.

For the sake of our daughters, we need to dismantle the myth of the ‘cool’ clique and replace it with the truth of the richness of varied human relationships. Professor Paechter’s research has helped us along the way.

 

Nov 17

Violent video games DO make teenagers more aggressive

A recent study by researchers at Brock University in Canada, reported in The Telegraph, found that teenagers who play violent video games over an extended period of years do in fact become more aggressive themselves. The longtitudinal study involved 1,492 adolescents from eight High Schools in Ontario, with the participants 14 or 15 at the start, and 17 or 18 at the end, and it compared how use of video games correlated with behaviour in the real world. Regular players of violent games were found to be more likely to react aggressively to unintentional provocation in real life, while those who played non-violent games did not show increased aggressive tendencies. To clarify their findings, the researchers found no evidence that more aggressive teenagers were more likely to play violent video games in the first place; there really did appear to be a causal link between the games and external aggressive behaviour.

This is of course no surprise to those of us in education, who help see many thousands – hundreds of thousands – of young people through the exciting, turbulent, demanding, vulnerable and impressionable years of their childhood and teenagehood. We know the importance of role models and of modelling sensible, socially appropriate behaviour; we are reminded frequently that a young child is a blank canvas, upon which will be marked a unique mixture of genes, circumstances, family, friends and experiences, and out of which will come a fully-formed adult different to none another, yet with much in common with many or most. We understand that prevailing cultures – be they in the classroom, in the community, or in the media – have an enormous impact on young people, and that a considerable amount of our energy as educators is spent trying to guide our charges through the conflicting messages they receive, doing our best to balance their development as individuals who will determine their own thoughts and feelings, with their development as social beings who need to learn how to appreciate the world around them, and to contribute to it.

Video games have much going for them – the development of mental and manual dexterity, for instance – and we should certainly not put them all on the ‘do not touch’ pile of socially unacceptable activities. But we do have to be critical about their content, and not be afraid to speak out about – and, if necessary, regulate – content which can be potentially harmful to individuals, especially young people (for whom we all have a particular responsibility), and which can be equally harmful to our society. Studies such as this one are helpful in giving a greater impetus to our task.

Don’t be afraid to look at – and be vocal about – the content of your teenager’s video gaming choices.

 

Nov 14

Do not judge people by their outward appearance. The words of the girls of St Mary’s Calne.

This is the text of today’s Assembly at St Mary’s Calne – written, led and delivered passionately by the girls. It struck me that Positive Image Month is working – for these are the thought leaders of the future, and this is what they are thinking. I offer especial thanks to Ellys Airey for allowing me to reproduce her words here:

Do not judge people by their outward appearance.

Our society nowadays is used to judging people on their appearance first and on their personality second. Ugliness itself is a personal perception, just as beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. Nowadays people spend a lot of time making sure we look good on the outside, but what are we doing to make sure we look good on the inside? Beauty in the way society perceives it is not always a blessing. Even the most outwardly stunning people can have selfish, mean traits, which make them ugly. In Samuels 16:7 the Bible says “the Lord does not look at the things man looks at.  Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”

It is the easiest thing in the world to judge someone without getting to know them. In a recent survey of the nation, three fifths of people said they form their opinion of someone within just 5 seconds of meeting them and more than a third said appearance was everything when forming first impression. 37% of Londoners reported that they ‘always’ judge someone by their appearance when meeting them for the first time, whereas we are thankfully among the less judgmental of people, as those who live in the south west are the most forgiving with only 17 per cent forming their opinion about someone purely on their appearance.

‘Outer beauty attracts, but inner beauty captivates.’ If you can look at yourself and love the way you are now, then nothing can stop your inner beauty shinning through. Audrey Hepburn was deemed one of the most beautiful women to date, but it wasn’t her sheer outwardly attraction that was truly stunning but her inner beauty. Years ago when she was asked about her beauty secrets, she replied with remarkable grace: “for lovely eyes, seek out the good in people. For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry. For beautiful hair, let a child run his or her fingers through it once a day.”

As Eleanor Roosevelt so rightly said, “No matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and honesty are written across her face, she will be beautiful.” The ability to believe in yourself, listen to others, exercise forgiveness and most importantly have confidence in all you do and in what you want to achieve, will essentially give you your inner beauty, because after all you cannot hide your inner self under a layer of makeup forever.

This lifted my heart this morning – girls, well done!! Onwards!

 

Nov 13

Why I am teaching my children about porn

The media last week was full of comment and reports that the National Association of Head Teachers had called for children to be taught about porn as part of the sex education lessons (see, for example, this report on the BBC News website). Inevitably this was misinterpreted in some quarters as something of tremendous danger to young children, as if the intention was to corrupt them and warp their understanding of the world by placing them in front of uninterrupted scenes from hard core porn movies for hours on end, and leaving it to them to work out what was right and what wasn’t.

I preferred to interpret it differently, namely as a call to pre-empt the almost inevitable, ie that children will see porn at some stage in their teenage lives, and we as their parents and teachers should prepare them to reject its harmful elements, and to put it into a values-laden context. A significant proportion of children will view porn, sometimes by accident and sometimes because through curiosity they have sought it out; they are often not prepared, however, for the fact that it can prove distressing and damaging, and they are certainly not prepared – given the vast weight of sexualised material they see around them every day – to be able to distinguish that women in porn are overwhelmingly presented in an objectified manner.

So – forewarned is forearmed. I have already started to explain to my pre-teen eldest child that there are bad things on the internet, and that despite the filters we put in place to stop this stuff getting through, he may encounter inappropriate images. I am trying to give him strategies – not to be afraid to tell, to navigate away from sites, to recognise that this is not real, and that the way in which women are portrayed is harmful to both men and to women, because everyone should be equal in the world. I am starting to explain that this is not always about love, which is what all great relationships should be built on.

There is of course a danger in telling children about porn – ie that they will go and actively seek it out. But no parent or school can ever protect children forever from the fact that bad things happen, and that women are presented in degrading ways in the internet. At least by preparing our children to know that it exists, to know that it is unreal, and to know that it can be extremely harmful to women, we stand a chance of being able to communicate to children that this is not what sex is all about, and we have the opportunity to share some of our values around sex, love, and how men and women should be treated equally in all aspects of life.