What's Over the Horizon for Year 13 Founders’ Day 2023

Founders’ Day 2023 and our Commemoration Service marks 138 years of Roedean School, but, more importantly, this year is our 125th anniversary of Roedean on this site. The School has stood the test of time, in terms of its people, its buildings, and its vision, and we will be celebrating this anniversary in a variety of ways over the course of 2023.

In the service, we remember all those who have been part of our community, who have died over the course of the past year, lighting a candle for each. The service is also a thanksgiving, in which we show our gratitude to those who left their mark in so many different ways, here and in wider lives, and who gave so much in their connection with the School. We are saying goodbye to people who have been loved and loving, generous and giving, determined and visionary. They were people who have lived full lives and persevered through difficulty. Your own tributes are deeply personal and we are humbled by the achievements and lives we honour today. Those we honour are your mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, grandparents, family, and friends. They were also, at some point in their lives, our pupils, our colleagues, our leaders. We are enriched through their contribution and ennobled by their courage and example.

We give thanks to the Lawrence sisters. In each of those we commemorate, it is always hard to conceive a life in its entirety, and instead we remember life on a human scale, as a moment, a habit, or the small things that can sum up a human life. Our founders, Penelope, Dorothy, and Millicent Lawrence, come to us as formal figures, perhaps a little remote, but I would like to think of them today through the voices of the girls and staff who knew them:

Of Millicent Lawrence: ‘Inspiring enthusiasm, offering clear judgement and wise advice, a genius for organization, extreme kindliness, unfailing sense of humour, and always living up to her favourite motto, “a large heart and a wide horizon”.’

Of Dorothy Lawrence: ‘A chuckling sense of humour, an all-pervading sweetness of spirit, a true sense of justice, a rare understanding, a loving heart, the calm beauty of an unruffled lake.’

Of Penelope Lawrence: ‘Unselfish and intense in her love of family, who evoked affection and respect everywhere she went. A woman of finalising their portfolios ahead of submission to some of the most prestigious Art Schools in the UK.

And finally, we have a number of applications in process for highly competitive Degree Apprenticeships, with students receiving offers of interviews following their online assessments. Harmony has been accepted onto the 2023 KPMG Black Heritage Insight Programme, which will give her a great insight into apprenticeships in the company, whilst the interview processes themselves are giving the students applying for Degree Apprenticeships an excellent opportunity to work on their interview technique.

We look forward to sharing more news of their exciting futures in the weeks and months to come!

Dr Hannan

outstanding sincerity with an unassuming outlook: intelligent, sensitive, and appreciative and lofty.’

The sisters did something amazing in founding Roedean – in passing, the sisters were not mourned, but celebrated with prayers of thanksgiving for giving all us a ‘work so visible in material achievement, so immeasurable in its intangible influence upon mind and spirit’. I ask us to think of all who are commemorated today in terms of both their visible achievements and their intangible influence on our lives. We thank our founders for having the courage and creativity to imagine a school that even years later was still described as a ‘sublime act of faith’.

All in this room have been touched in some way by their influence, and the words of our founders’ family are words for us all: ‘Many lives have been and continue to be more fully lived because Nelly, Dolly and Milly, the Lawrence sisters, saw visions and had the courage to follow the gleam.’