Dear Parents and Carers

Inspiration and Perspiration

“Inspire Me”. “Inspire and Guide”. “An Inspired Education”. There is clearly a thread that runs through the Stephen Perse Foundation, but what does this mean? What does it look like every day?

When I think of inspiration, the first thing that springs to mind is our students. I never fail to be amazed by the individual and team stories that I hear about on a day-to-day basis. Here are some recent stories from our Twitter feed that show some of these in action:

It is easy to attribute this to talent, but a great deal of perspiration went on behind the scenes to achieve these successes. This sort of effort is often unseen, often at unsociable hours, and often bookends a long day of demanding lessons at school. Hats off to them all.

I’ve written a great deal about the inspirational spaces that we are now occupying, and we are still in the honeymoon period where just walking around the new build is a special experience. True inspiration cannot come just from the space itself, but will result from the amalgamation of the space with the people. Fortunately we have not just brilliant students, but fantastic staff, and I have every confidence that they will exceed our expectations of how the space can be used. In some senses, the perspiration is over with the lion’s share of the building work now complete, but in many ways the effort of doing justice to the space is just beginning.

Although inspiration is often spontaneous, we do our best to plan for it as well, and this is most evident in the wonderful ‘Inspire and Guide’ programme, aimed mainly at our Year 10 and 11 students. This is a rolling weekly programme mainly made up of external speakers talking about their lives and careers, and how they got to be where they are. This term we have had a New York Times journalist, followed by a Times fashion writer (a personal contact that came from IB physics lessons!), a forensic linguist, two CEOs and a writer. Over coming weeks we have a museum registrar, a style coach, an inventor and the owner of a software start-up company. I am tremendously grateful to all the parents who have volunteered to speak, and to my colleagues who have helped to set up such an incredible programme. If you feel you could contribute to the Inspire and Guide programme, I am looking for people to speak to next year’s cohort, so please do get in touch. All who have done this to date have agreed it was an enjoyable experience and hopefully the preparation won’t involve too much perspiration!

Warm wishes,

David Walker

Head of Senior School