Word from the Head – 2 May 2025

Dear Parents,

This week has been all about our Year 13 students, whose celebrations of their last week at school have been epic.  The annual tradition of wearing themed costumes every day has reached new heights this year: the Manly Monday, When I Grow Up and the much-beloved Dress as a Teacher days were particular highlights.  We were moved to tears at an extraordinary Sixth Form Concert on Wednesday evening, as the talent and hard work of the musicians and vocalists were showcased for the last time, and yesterday saw our formal rite of passage of the Year 13 Leavers’ Assembly.

It was a pleasure to welcome Year 13’s parents to see their children recognised for all they have accomplished in the years they have spent at Channing.  It seems slightly counterintuitive that these farewells are part of what binds our community together, but there is something very special about acknowledging publicly the journey of these students through the school and wishing them well as they step out of our world and into a new one which they will make their own.

Mrs Tomback, Director of Sixth Form, and I both enjoyed the opportunity to speak to Year 13, and of course the wider school, to mark the occasion.  In thinking about what words of wisdom I might share I was reminded of the comedian, actor, writer and composer Tim Minchin’s valedictory address to the graduating Class of 2013 at the University of Western Australia. You’ll know him as the composer of Matilda the Musical, and it won’t surprise you to learn that his speech was not entirely serious. He opened by saying:

In darker days, I did a corporate gig at a conference for this big company who made and sold accounting software. In a bid, I presume, to inspire their salespeople to greater heights, they’d forked out 12 grand for an inspirational speaker who was this extreme sports guy who had had a couple of his limbs frozen off when he got stuck on a ledge on some mountain. It was weird. Software salespeople, I think, need to hear from someone who has had a long, successful career in software sales, not from an overly optimistic ex-mountaineer.

Some poor guy who had arrived in the morning hoping to learn about sales techniques ended up going home worried about the blood flow to his extremities. It’s not inspirational, it’s confusing. 

That reminded me of an interview I saw a few years ago of an American business school professor, Scott Galloway, discussing his book The Algebra of Happiness.  In it, he talked about the people who are invited to speak at business schools – highly successful entrepreneurs brought in as role models and motivational speakers for the students who are usually, as he put it, ‘billionaires who are automatically expected to have some kind of insight about life’, who in his view then give some of the worst possible advice to young people: ‘follow your passion’.  He goes on to say:

“If someone tells you to follow your passion, it means they’re already rich… This is your job: your job is to find something you’re good at and then spend the thousands of hours and apply the grit and the perseverance and the sacrifice and the willingness to break through hard things to become great at it.  Because, once you’re great at something, the economic accoutrements of being great at something, the prestige, the relevance, the camaraderie, the self-worth of being great will make you passionate about whatever it is… 

And here’s the problem with believing you should follow your passion.  Work is hard, and when you face injustice, which is a guaranteed attribute of the workplace, you’ll start thinking ‘I’m not loving this. This is upsetting and hard. It must not be my passion.’ ”

Interestingly, Tim Minchin agreed.  He had nine life lessons to share with the university students and number 1 was: ‘You don’t have to have a dream’.  As he put it,

Americans on talent shows always talk about their dreams. Fine, if you have something you’ve always wanted to do, dreamed of, like in your heart, go for it. After all, it’s something to do with your time, chasing a dream. And if it’s a big enough one, it’ll take you most of your life to achieve, so by the time you get to it and are staring into the abyss of the meaninglessness of your achievement, you’ll be almost dead, so it won’t matter. 

I never really had one of these dreams, and so I advocate passionate dedication to the pursuit of short-term goals.  Be micro-ambitious. Put your head down and work with pride on whatever is in front of you. You never know where you might end up.  Just be aware the next worthy pursuit will probably appear in your periphery, which is why you should be careful of long-term dreams.  If you focus too far in front of you, you won’t see the shiny thing out the corner of your eye.

And I agree with both of them – not least because I know that many of Year 13 were thinking ‘but I don’t have a passion, or a dream’ – and let me reassure you, nor did I (nor indeed do a lot of people) at 18.  However I love the idea of being micro-ambitious: giving your all to the thing in front of you and then moving to the next thing.  In this morning’s assembly – Year 11’s last one before their GCSE exams start – I reminded them of this again and encouraged them to pace themselves through the next six weeks by taking each exam as it comes, rather than getting fixated on how much there is still to do.

Indeed this morning’s assembly was the last one for all of us in the Senior School until both the public exams, and the internal ones, have taken place: we won’t convene in the Sports Hall again until Tuesday 24 June!  It provided me with a good excuse for reminding the rest of the school that, while Year 11 and Year 13 are finally putting on their Nikes for the culmination of everything they have been working towards for the last 18 months, everyone else should still be in their ASICS (and if that reference is lost on you, here’s Word from the Head from the start of the year as a reminder).

I hope, then, that we have spent our time at Channing giving our leavers sensible advice – not putting frostbitten mountaineers or clueless billionaires in front of them as role models for the future.  Rather, I believe, they are the role models, in and of themselves.  You will all know my favourite William Ellery Channing line, “Each of us is meant to have a character all our own, to be what no other can exactly be, and do what no other can exactly do”.  To my mind, that is our leavers’ most important achievement – to have become the character that they are meant to be, something unique and entirely their own. They will not yet perhaps have explored fully what it means to be them, but I know that they have all, in their own ways, used the opportunities afforded to them by life at Channing to discover their interests, talents and personality.  And by being micro-ambitious, as Tim Minchin put it, they will make the most of those opportunities which are still to come.  They go with our love and best wishes as they do so.

Best wishes to all of you too as we head into the Bank Holiday weekend, whatever it may hold.

Mrs Lindsey Hughes
Headmistress