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Assembly for Year 11 and 13 girls with a message from the Principal

Hello Girls

You will likely know already that schools across the UK will close on Friday afternoon until further notice and the exams scheduled for May and June will not go ahead.

This does not mean there will be no examinations; we expect that some form of examination may well be scheduled in their place, or that colleges, sixth forms and universities will administer their own entry examinations in the new academic year and we will not miss a beat in preparing you for that eventuality. Your teachers may be given the opportunity to appeal for a higher grade for you, and we will need a strong evidence base to prove that we are correct in our predictions. This means that your teachers will be preparing you for exam questions from home and asking you to submit them so that they have lots of evidence of your strong performance.

As far as I am concerned, your education is paramount: there is nothing more important at this point in your lives and your education will not stop on Monday morning just because school will be closed. Your teachers have been working furiously to prepare for teaching you remotely and we will continue to do so online, contacting you and supporting you daily.

Today and tomorrow are a gift; we have precious moments with you to give you all that you need to put your nearly five years of education to the test. And this will be a great test of you. Much greater than any other Year 11 or Year 13 cohort there has been; you will need to use all you have learned about successful study in your subjects, to stand up for your education and to fight for it now.

We are with you in doing so. Exams are important because they provide you with an excellent bridge to A Level and further study. But the exams themselves are not the object and nor the aim. The aim is for you to enter further education head and shoulders above your peers from other schools, ready to succeed from the start.

We will keep preparing for that, because this strange period in time will pass and you will go on to further study, to do great things and to flourish out in the world. That is what you are really working towards and you cannot afford to miss a moment of that preparation.

I expect you to be on Teams every day, following your timetable and your teacher’s instructions, working towards exam preparation and A Level and university readiness. Your teachers will provide you with entry level A Level or university level work to ensure that you are ready to hit the ground running as soon as we return to school.

I am deeply proud of every one of you; you are a credit to your families and to our school. Show yourself the compassion to stand up for your education, the ambition to fight for it every day and the self-respect to do this not because you are aiming for an exam on a particular date, but because you deserve this education and the success it will give you in your future.

While you are working at home you must not go out into the community. You must stay at home and focus on your school work; we are all responsible for preventing the spread of Covid-19 and what you can do to protect the elderly and vulnerable in our community is stay home.

If you are worried about anything, please ask your teachers before you leave at the end of tomorrow. You are enormously important to us and we are very sad to have to ask you to stay at home, but we will keep working to support you while you are away from school and you can still stay in touch with us. What makes us a school are not the buildings we are in here, but how we connect with and care for each other.

Be safe. Take care of each other and yourselves. Be kind and be careful. Now is a time for Compassion, Ambition, Respect.

With much fondness,

Ms Iles-Smith

Principal