Like me, I suspect that many of you spent much of the summer glued to coverage of the Olympic Games in Paris. While we all love the thrill of seeing records broken and medals won, the true spirit of the Olympics runs much deeper. The Olympics teaches us invaluable lessons about life — lessons that align with the values of the Warwick Way: courage, creativity, curiosity, perseverance, humility, and responsibility.
On 13th August 1964, shortly after 8 o’clock in the morning, Peter Anthony Allen, and Gwynne Owen Evans both died. Peter Allen was in Liverpool, Gwynne Evans in Manchester.
The Warwick Way is what makes us distinctive and special – the beliefs and values that define us. We aim to build on our pupils’ individual strengths and help them to grow into well-rounded young men: confident but not arrogant who go on to play a positive role in the world. To this end we seek to develop six values:
Curiosity, Creativity, Courage, Humility, Perseverance, Responsibility.
Last week the Communities Secretary Michael Gove laid out a new definition of extremism. Extremism is now defined as “the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance”.
The line ‘Integrity is doing the right thing when, even when no one is looking.’ is commonly misattributed to the author of The Chronicles of Narnia C S Lewis. Although Lewis covered a similar theme in his work Mere Christianity the quote is actually taken from ‘Shattering the Glass Slipper’ the work of contemporary motivational speaker Charles Marshall. Whilst many of us will be familiar with work of C S Lewis far fewer, myself included will have read Marshall. Of course, the truth of an aphorism is not dependent on its authorship but the idea itself.
Last Friday was Holocaust Memorial Day. In the United Kingdom Holocaust Memorial Day is a National Day of Commemoration dedicated to remembering those who were persecuted by the Nazi’s. It is marked every year on 27 January the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
This week, for the fourth time in three years, Warwick School has found itself dealing with the loss of a much-loved member of our community. Tragically Mr Robertson (Dan) lost his battle with liver cancer on Tuesday. He leaves behind a wife, our colleague, teacher, and friend Kat, and two children. I am incredibly grateful that we were able to share news of his illness with the community before the Christmas holiday. This gave those closest to him an opportunity to contact him, and I know that the messages he received from pupils meant a huge amount to him. That his last days were calm peaceful and pain free, that he enjoyed Christmas with his family, and died surrounded by those he loved, is some consolation.
The Christmas holidays are here. Every family has its own Christmas traditions. This year for the first time in 44 years I will be spending Christmas Day, not at Mum and Dad’s or the ‘in laws’ but at my house. My ‘little’ sister, the 42-year-old barrister and her family are flying over from Connecticut to spend the ‘holidays’ with us and Mum and Dad will be joining us for the day. The pressure is on. Especially because roast dinner is the crowning glory in my limited kitchen repertoire and Christmas Dinner will be my responsibility. Rather than seeking to combine three sets of Christmas traditions, an impossible task, perhaps I should set out to create new ones, ones that are uniquely ours and in doing so perhaps I should seek inspiration in celebrations from around the world.
Warwick School has two towering memorial stones in Chapel to remember the Old Warwickians who died in the First and Second World Wars. At the time, the school worked hard to trace every casualty, and ensure no-one was missed from the list of names. However, this was not an easy task; the World Wars were huge, international conflicts, fought long before the advent of easy, instant communication. And tragically, we now know that a number of names were missed off these original memorial stones.
You have probably heard of Aesop’s Fables. The Fables are a collection of stories credited to Greek storyteller Aesop, who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564BCE. Tradition says he was born a slave, but developed a real talent for fables, stories that were used to teach truths in a simple, understandable way.
Just a week into the new school year and already the summer seems like a distant memory. Every year on the day before the start of term we welcome our new Year 7 cohort and give them a chance to familiarise themselves with the site, spend some time with their tutors and generally get themselves ready for the move to secondary school and its accompanying challenges.
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