Dear Year 11 and Year 13 students

It’s always quite an emotional week when we say goodbye to you all; even more so this year. Under normal circumstances, we have a goodbye day which is immediately followed by a month of exams when we see you every day. This year it all felt a little more final, although we will see many of you on and off over the next few months and all of you on your results days. Because of circumstances, there were things we were not able to do on your final day, including the usual assemblies in the halls. You did have that lucky escape from listening to me for 15 minutes, but if we had been able to get you together in the hall I would have said the following…

We are proud of what you have achieved over the last 2 years and the way you have gone about it. Yours are the year groups who studied for GCSE and A level exams through two national lockdowns and God knows how many periods of Covid isolations. Yours are the year groups who have focused on your studies whilst people around you were shouting about how education has been hammered by lockdowns. And yours are the year groups who time and time again amazed and impressed the staff at this school by bouncing back every time. You will now have a period of time when no doubt there will be all kinds of public political rows about the grades you will receive and the validity of them. The people who speak most often and most loudly on this don’t work with kids or teachers so my advice to you is don’t bother listening. Instead, just know that we won’t award you a grade too low as it wouldn’t reflect your learning and we won’t award a grade too high as it may put you on a path that isn’t right for you. We will give you the grades you have earned.

In the future you may be in an interview situation with someone assessing you, looking at the grades you have achieved. They may have some questions about them, earned as they were, through this year’s system and following two years of disrupted schooling. I would recommend you tell whoever this may be that yes, I did study this GCSE or A level course through the pandemic and you know what that means? That means I got up and in front of my computer every day to complete my live lessons and to complete all my work, not because I’m in a classroom being eyeballed by a teacher but because I want to learn and get my grades. That means I kept a constant stream of communication open with all my teachers throughout the lockdowns so that I didn’t fall behind. That means that when I was sent home due to being close to one of the 118 cases of Covid in my school, I tuned into every class so I could join in. I was a teenager who couldn’t go out as it was against the law and everything was closed, I was a teenager who had to sit in classrooms in a mask and I was a teenager who had to get used to growing up in a country that was scared and fearful. Yet I adapted: to studying alone at home with my computer, to never seeing my friends, to a constantly changing set of rules, to being sent home 3 days after coming back after my last contact isolation, and to having to hear politicians arguing about how messed up my education has been and yet here I am. Successful. I have a set of skills that no other year group before me has ever had, I am resilient to everything that has been thrown at me, I have had to work independently and I have a set of grades here that I have earned through my own hard graft so don’t, for a second, doubt me or my grades.

I would also add to that list that you left with the respect of all the staff at your school.

I wish you every success in whatever choice you have made.

Yours sincerely

Andy Perry – Head Teacher

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