Sherborne Girls Voices

Launch of #Sherborne Girls Voices Share opinions, ask questions, challenge key issues, stand up for what you believe in, drive change and make a difference.

Ask the Head Girls are invited to raise questions and ideas at this fortnightly Q&A session with the Headmistress.

Diverse Voices A pupil forum that is leading the School’s stand against discrimination.

Pastoral Forum A pupil forum that engages in a pastoral discussion with pupils from Sherborne School. Votes for Schools Girls are encouraged to contribute to this national poll, voting on issues that affect them most.

#Voices Blog A platform that celebrates ‘Courage’ through creative writing, opinion pieces, art, drama and poetry.

We have also launched several alumnae projects that dovetail into our SherborneGirlsVoices initiative:

Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) – every day of GEW, we shared a video interview with an inspiring Old Girl, each reflecting the entrepreneurial traits of creativity, communication, collaboration, curiosity and courage. Caring for our Community – using our collective SherborneGirlsVoices to make a positive difference, a team of recent leavers are calling Old Girls who may be feeling lonely or isolated during lockdown. Community Carol – in the spirit of celebrating our SherborneGirlsVoices, we have invited Old Girls to get involved in our virtual Carol Service by submitting a recording of the final carol ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful’. Watch out for this on social media nearer to Christmas.

This has been a challenging year; however, in the face of such adversity, it has been humbling to see so much kindness, support and collaboration from our Sherborne Girls community.

As the country went into a second lockdown, our thoughts turned to our community once again and we launched an initiative to reach out to Old Girls who might be feeling lonely or isolated with the new restrictions and winter months

ASK THE HEAD…

The West Prefect Team and I have been very excited to be able to go to the ‘Ask the Head’ sessions, which have recently been introduced. We had a few questions that we wanted to raise as a house, so I was really pleased there was somewhere we could go to ask them.

In these online sessions we joined a meeting and listened to some of the fascinating questions that the rest of the School had to ask, whilst Dr Sullivan, Mrs Briggs and Mrs Orton answered them. There were such different questions ranging from the food and house-keeping, to teaching and sports. Everyone had lots of useful information about School life and what was happening in the near future. If you would like to do something

Some of the biggest questions asked were based on the food and how we can have greater variation of salad/soup and snacks and about how we work around Covid-19 as a School. So many people had amazing ideas about how we could improve as a whole School community. Overall we are so pleased that Dr Sullivan came up with such a brilliant idea to include pupils’ voices to help the

Ealish Platt-Ransom and Millie Samuel (Aldhelmsted West)

CARING CALL

drawing in. We invited a group of recent leavers to help us call Old Girls over the age of 70, to offer a friendly voice on the end of the phone, to make sure that our Old Girls feel cared for, and to share some memories and uplifting news from School to brighten their day.

The initiative dovetails into our Sherborne Girls Voices project, showing how we can use our collective voice to make a positive difference, as well as providing meaningful voluntary work for recent leavers who may have had their gap years disrupted, find themselves on furlough or in limbo as a result of the pandemic.

School be the best it can be! positive to support more vulnerable members of our Sherborne Old Girls community, please do get in touch at friends@sherborne.com.

Katherine Massey

Director of Development and Marketing

DIVERSE VOICES

In response to the atrocious events that occurred during the summer of 2020 and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, Angel Lulu-Briggs, Amara Agwo, Milly Staples and I decided to voice our opinions about racism to the School community. In a well written, compelling email from Angel Lulu-Briggs, signed by over 200 girls both in the School and Sherborne Girls alumnae, we sought to convey our message.

In the email, present and past students outlined their encounters with racism and how they felt the School could have done more. In response, more discussion opened up between students and teachers, including a meeting with Dr Ruth Sullivan, Mrs Jessica Briggs, Eve Messervy (one of the equality prefects), Angel, Amara, Milly and me. This resulted in the introduction of the Diverse Voices committee, a group of students that work alongside the Senior Leadership Team to drive the School’s stand against all forms of discrimination including, but not limited to, racial, socio-economic, physical and neurological inequality.

Since then, the Diverse Voices committee has been able to attend a seminar on inclusivity, host a Q&A evening session for pupils, as well as introduce a new member, Nicole Appleby. As a group we hope to ensure that Sherborne Girls continues to be an all-embracing community that accepts people from all backgrounds and identities. This is the core value and belief of the group and the legacy that we would like to leave for the girls in the younger years to take forward.