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An incredible test of resilience
We are looking forward to Friday night this week, when our Year 11 students can finally celebrate the end of their hard graft at their prom.
What a couple of years it has been for this cohort! How grateful we are to be able to hold their prom this year, given that the restrictions of the pandemic made the event impossible for the previous 2 years; it was a sorely-missed rite of passage.
Is it too early and pre-emptive to celebrate? After all, results won't be released until mid-August.
No, I don't think this is the case at all. To delay all celebration would be to forget that an immense amount of effort has gone into reaching this point. Our young people have overcome adversity relating to Coronavirus, have attended additional revision lessons during holidays and after school and have gone home to carry on with their own personal revision plans after that. They have navigated uncertainty at the start of the year - no one really knew what the year ahead would bring - and managed their own worries about what the impact of the last couple of years might be.
Friday evening, then, represents the end of what has been an incredible test of resilience, and is an acknowledgement of the lengths to which our young people have gone in order to perform in the 'normal' exam series that has been very far from normal in the preceding two years of preparation.
Our Year 13 students, too, are about to mark the end of their entire school career and, in them, we will be waving goodbye to a cohort that found their GCSE exams cancelled back in March 2019, during the most unprecedented of times.
Those of us who have been through the education system during more predictable times cannot truly know how it feels to be the first cohort to resume 'normality' when that was very far from what they themselves experienced over the past two years. I do know, however, that this makes them our most resilient and determined cohorts yet! Watch out, world, Year 11 and Year 13 are about to take flight and move on into the next steps in their exciting journeys...
Good luck to you all - and don't forget to let us know where your travels take you, we can't wait to hear about your adventures!
