Dear Parent/Guardian
The Easter Term certainly went out like a lion! During the last week of the longest term in recent history, the inspectorate called; and like buses, they came in twos!
A total of seven inspectors, the combined forces of OFSTED and the Independent Schools’ Inspectorate descended on our fair school and stayed for several days. I am very grateful to all parents who contributed to the on-line survey which, may I add, was incredibly difficult to access. Merely to get on to the site required typical Abbotsholme persistence and determination. Perhaps that was the task! ‘The school done well!’ is the verdict in football parlance, as we are100% compliant in the regulatory requirements and have received good or outstanding grades in all areas investigated. The inspectors were actually smiling as they left, and they liked the place. Perhaps they had a little of Abbotsholme’s DNA in their cells! The chief ISI inspector returns with a new team in the second week of May for a second visit, although this is not because they liked Abbotsholme so much, but a normal part of the new inspection system.
The end of term ‘It’s a Knockout’ was a fantastic occasion. The weather smiled on us yet again and everyone got very wet and muddy, including me when I was dragged backwards on the slippery slide by a group of Year 8s and pushed into a ‘pond’ by John McFarland: a perfect antidote to the formalities of feedback from the inspection. It was a brilliant occasion, and Abbotsholme at its best.
The whole school photograph on Tuesday completed the final week’s roar, and I look forward to seeing what will be my fifth photograph. The Headmaster’s definition of the ageing process is that time flies and his hairline recedes, but that Year 10 are always the same age!
I do apologise for not commenting on the reports this term; I found that I could only borrow time and not make it. It is important that parents get reports as soon as possible at the end of term, but, as always, if you would like to talk about the content of the report, please do not hesitate to contact me.
The story of the term, with its incredible range of opportunities both offered and taken, is told through the various media of In Touch, Clarion calls and old-fashioned snail-mail. Follow me on @Abbotsholmehead on Twitter or become my ‘friend’ on Facebook. I could do with friends! Despite my reservations about multi-media sites, they can make communication quick and effective if they are used properly. They make me feel very ‘young’ when I use them, too!
I will remember this Spring Term for the beautiful April weather, the cherry blossom in the Roseyard and a young girl calling it ‘confetti in my hair’.
I have planted a tree in front of my office, a cherry tree, commissioned, if that’s what you do with trees, with very dear friends of mine at Abbotsholme. We want to see it grow; we want to see children sitting under it.
I finish with a poem about spring and the inspiration for the planting of the cherry tree. As I mentioned earlier, there is a wonderful paradox about, on the one hand, the ageing process, and, on the other, the timeless faces of the pupils in our old school photographs. When he was a young man, A E Housman wrote about seeing the cherry blossom each year, a sight which he found particularly affecting. He decided that he’d better make the best of the fifty years he had left since the cherry was only briefly in flower once a year, and he would only be able to enjoy the sight of cherry blossom another fifty times in his whole life.
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
A E Housman
Though we grow older, year by year, there will always be an Abbotsholme, there will always be spring, and there will always be Easter and its cherry trees to delight us and the generations still to come.
Heather, Meg and I wish you a happy Easter.
Yours sincerely,
Steve Fairclough
Headmaster