Headmaster's introduction

Headmaster, Alasdair Kennedy, on why it is important to lead through values

We want to nurture our students to become extraordinary young people. The person that each individual will become through being at Trinity, what they achieve, and what they will choose to do to make a positive impact on the world when they leave us – these are the outcomes that motivate our day-to-day work with them.

We are ambitious for our students and the difference they can make, and so we want to give them the experiences that will promote the character, the leadership, the qualifications and the self-confidence to believe it.

It is important too that they leave us ready to join and contribute well to all kinds of diverse communities, but with the humility that acknowledges there is always more to learn. We can open doors for them to the world’s best universities, colleges and careers, and equally they can learn the skills and responsibility to care for others.

We are convinced that these outcomes are best achieved in a culture of strong values. Our most important values –curiosity, ambition, kindness, joining-in and looking outwards –need to be experienced as if they are part of the fabric of the school.

They are best articulated in the thousands of relational interactions that happen every day, between students and staff, and among students themselves. Values are caught much more than they are taught, and there is an important balance to get right between what we say and what we do. Students and staff very quickly know the difference between a list of words on a wall or website, or spoken in an assembly, and what they experience in a corridor, classroom, office or on a pitch. The latter needs to come first, led by staff and taken on by students.

There are many examples of those experiences at Trinity: I love seeing our students speak unprompted about their teachers enjoying what they do and being committed to them and their progress. Our students have an obvious appetite for learning outside their timetables, where they get to lead and express their interests; our individual mentoring programme gives time for genuine, focused, caring conversations between many Sixth Form students and younger students, which both find so rewarding.

Many of our students are not superstar musicians or sportsplayers, but their participation and progress is encouraged and respected by those who are expert; our students engage so positively with the wider Shirley and Croydon community around us and are ready to give their time and energy to it.

There are many positive ways for strong values to be expressed, but they will also help our students to make good choices now and in the future. We are navigating through a time in which our young people are more exposed to pervasive influences than previous generations were; how should they weigh and respond to them?

I hope Trinity students will leave us with deeply ingrained experiences of the values that make a good community, and that these will give them an intuitive sense of what is important.

This edition of In Trinity is a celebration of our students’ interests and achievements, and through them the values that they are making their own. I hope you will enjoy reading about them.