Every year a new start

Every year I enjoy walking down to the pitches on the first Tuesday afternoon of the autumn term to see the new Ds in their brand new sports kit tackling the business of learning the ropes of rugby and hockey. The sports kit is pristine – you can even still see the folds in the shirts. It’s also a great deal of fun for me to see the members of staff involved with coaching these neophyte teams, teaching them, as actively as in a classroom, about the elusive skill of being both an individual and a member of a developing team.

A wise colleague of mine observed that there is one particular thing in a teacher’s job which distinguishes it from many other professions. And no, it’s not just the wonderful summer holidays. It’s that, in September, there is an enormous sense of turning a new page. Academic diaries change colour; new and/or updated policies are uploaded to the school website; all the children move on into a new year of learning; 172 new pupils enter the school. Few fellow professionals have quite the same ‘new shoes’ start to any session. And I think this makes teachers very fortunate.

Starting in a new school, or indeed in a new job, can be daunting. We do our level best to make sure that all who join us in September can quickly involve themselves – and be involved too – in activities so that relationships are forged through shared enterprise. And that goes for the staff too. Each year we welcome a number of new faces to the team. They hit the ground running and learn alongside the pupils the arcane vocabulary of HMC, ECA, Room 17 and other such Bryanston vernacular (though no pupil will ever be allowed in Room 17!).

One of our key new staff is David James who comes to us as our first Deputy Head Academic from his role as Head of IB at Wellington College. As an English teacher he is engaging in the classroom with a fair few Bryanstonians, new and returning, and I am much looking forward to watching him drive developments in the academic area. I’m also very pleased that he is here to help us remain a characteristic more-than-one-step-ahead of all the various changes in the examination sphere and he is, of course, charged in his wide-ranging brief with pushing the school onwards and upwards with individual as well as collective academic ambition and success. He’s already made a promising start.

So much for the nova. The vetera still thrives at Bryanston. Laurent Johnson and Pippa Quarrell each take on the role of Senior Tutor and their responsibility is to ensure all the new staff settle in and that the ever-evolving issue of appraisal (not a topic that gets many of us jumping out of bed in the morning) is further strengthened. Richard Boulton joins us from his role in charge of training for GB rowing as Head of Rowing at Bryanston and will build upon the loving work of Graham Elliot, who took care of the Boat Club for nearly 20 years. My own daughters owed their love of rowing to his work on the river. I know Richard will breathe an external gust into this rewarding corner of the school and I am looking forward to watching him coach aspiring Matthew Pinsents, Katherine Graingers and, more likely, lots of interested and enthusiastic youngsters who are starting in a boat for the first time ever.

There’s a sense of a new start every September and this September is no exception. I wish you all a fantastic beginning to your child’s new school year and hope to see lots of you at matches, concerts, and in the newly rebranded (Nero) Café!

Renewed epiphanies

January’s the time when we look back to the old year and forward to the new, remembering, whether we know it or not, the Roman god after whom the month is named. Janus was the two-faced god, who could look both back and forth and so comprehensively guard entry points and doors. We needed some sort of guard at the turn of this particular year: the old one went out with storms and came in with them too. It’s hard not to see the weather as metaphorical when it takes up so much of one’s energies and thoughts.

The feast of the Epiphany celebrated on January 6th is a part of this bridge between the old year and the new, as we recall the journey of the Magi, those men with their resonant names of Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, who brought those odd gifts to the baby Jesus. And I think the beginning of the year feels just the right time for epiphanies in various different forms.

Epiphanies for some are at this particular time of year about eating less, exercising more or in some new and more - or less - brutal way, or other such new-year resolutions. Pundits in the press tell us each January what we should worry about over the coming twelve months; who’s on the up, who’s on the slide. (BRICS has now turned into MINT I am told…). Rarely (with the exception of Radio Four’s racing tips) do they review their previous annual predictions for veracity, so each year they can frighten us about whatever they want to with complete impunity.

Of course there are things we should be concerned about and change for which we should fight. Preserving the world’s resources and establishing a fair and humane way of dealing with our fellow men will always top any sane agenda. But those are big challenges and because we can’t think about them for long enough to solve them, we distract ourselves with how did Sherlock survive his fall? Or how do I give up sugar altogether? We are, after all, human.

A renewed epiphany for me this Christmas has been a certainty that in schools we need to be caring for a much wider agenda than just transmitting information. Information is only really useful when you know what to do with it. And as Jamie Oliver, a man refreshingly happy to be contentious, put it recently when describing his daughters’ schooling, education ought to be about what you love.

So, this January, I am hoping for lots of suitable epiphanies and much enthusiasm for the big themes of life, love, education, and of making 2014 a better year than last.

et nova et vetera!