Headmaster’s Notes: The Greatness of Community

As we embark on this period of learning from home, how uplifting it has been to witness the Prince’s Mead community embrace the challenges that the beginning of this Lent term has presented to us and to receive such encouraging feedback from those pupils, parents and teachers that I have had the privilege of meeting this week. It has been wonderful to welcome a number of new families to our community too and I do hope they have sensed the warmth of Prince’s Mead from afar.

As I met with you this week, I hope you recognised our commitment to support you and to provide an enriching programme of academic lessons and extra-curricular sport and activities. We are conscious that this is not an easy period, with many challenges for each family, but we are so grateful to you for providing such supportive and stable environments for your children to work from. Alongside the daily curriculum programme, we have a lot to look forward to over the coming weeks, with competitions, STEM learning challenges and fireplace stories. I look forward to witnessing your children develop as they thrive even more.

I sense that the children have rightly built on all that they learned, both in the first national lockdown but also their Digital Learning during the Michaelmas term, eclipsing many of us adults with their IT wizardry! Thank you for all that you are doing at home in support of your children, in getting them to the right Zoom lesson, Drama and Music session or Future Schools interview practice on time, enabling PE challenges to take place in living rooms and gardens and for maintaining that semblance of routine at home. We continue to encourage your children to draw on the support of their teachers, ask questions if they are uncertain of anything at all and, in good Prince’s Mead fashion, to have the confidence to offer up suggestions and put forward ideas.

We are certainly missing seeing your children – and indeed you as parents – in person, but despite the physical distance between us, the Prince’s Mead community spirit continues to remain as strong as ever. We continue to do all we can to ensure our remote learning programme delivers the best possible educational experience and there is no doubt that it will continue to evolve over time.

I do hope that you have a restful and screen-free, weekend.

Mr Peter Thacker