Thank you for your lovely messages and gifts, emails, cards and conversations about your thoughts and experiences over recent weeks, and for your gratitude and appreciation for our School. I send you mine in return.
You may read this little message from me and resonate with it tenderly, or you may dismiss it coldly as my own one-sided private therapy session and sneer about my imminent breakdown on WhatsApp: do with it what you wish. However, I ask you take a brief moment to stop, cease, be still and see yourselves and those around you.
I have watched and felt, today in particular, how the emotional, physical and cognitive intensity of the last weeks of term can be overwhelming for many of our children, and I am going to assert with some assurance that us adults are the same - whether we be parents or school staff or, of course, both.
We feel deeply when relationships between us and children and families end after periods of growth and development in our care - time in which we have poured our hearts, minds and souls.
We feel deeply when long-standing, much-loved colleagues end their service to the School
…when we have organised and enjoyed and experienced the major social events and occasions which add such a special sparkle to the end of the term, yet demand so much of so few;
…when we suddenly see yet another year pass, and realise the ongoing, incessant passage of time;
…or simply, when we are exhausted, having given our all.
Maybe it is the thought of the long summer break.
Maybe the longing for a forthcoming holiday, but the pure stress of getting it started.
Maybe we suddenly have our own children - who we love dearly - but who we fear we’ll fail to occupy / entertain / keep well / appreciate / like / have like us [delete as appropriate].
However you are feeling - and however I am feeling, once I work it out - I wish you a sound, gentle, positive and generally uneventful period of rest and recovery.
Time to feel the sun, sense some silence and hold a hand.
Thank you for the year.
Yours, as ever
Richard
Headteacher
PS Please ignore the message above if you are off to Oasis in a champagne supernova, and couldn’t care less. You gotta roll with it, right?
