DIXIT
EDITION 125 10th September 2021
The weekly newsletter for the Holyport College family
From the Head Master It has been such a delight to welcome our staff and students back this September; seeing their enthusiasm to return, their engagement with their learning and their joy at being reunited with friends and beginning to make new ones has felt like a real return to normality. My beginning of term message to our students is the same every year: work hard, say yes to opportunities and be kind to one another. This year, in my beginning of term assembly on Monday, I put a particular emphasis on kindness. Very few people ever set out to be unkind to someone else but a great many of us end up causing hurt or upset to others by the things we do and say by failing to take their feelings or circumstances into account. This year, I have therefore called for “active” kindness from our community: active kindness means making a choice to be kind and making a choice to consider the thoughts and feelings of others. This approach to active kindness will be reinforced through our personal development programme this term with all students taught what it means to be anti-racist; what it means to be anti-homophobic and what healthy relationships and boundaries look like in the real world. We will also be educating our students not to be bystanders but to speak out when the behaviour of peers falls short of these standards. With the return of a full programme of sports and sporting fixtures, the commencement of our co-curriculum programme next week, hugely exciting plans for Drama and Music later in the year and the realisation of our new boarding and pastoral structures (with all the opportunities for enrichment that these bring), I truly believe that we are set to have an incredible year. Ben McCarey Head Master @holyportcollege
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