Head’s blog
In our first assembly, I addressed an audience of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed new pupils eager to listen about the start of their educational journey at The Mount, Mill Hill International. I urged them to be ‘bold, brave and compassionate’. It is easy to see why we encourage our pupils to be bold and brave if we wish to equip them for life now and in the future; we need to embrace challenge and risk-taking without fear of failure or ‘getting it wrong’, but why compassionate?
To build a sense of community we need to look out for each other. I have been truly moved by witnessing this quality in our pupils, already in the first week of term. In one of the first written assignments I asked all the pupils at The Mount, Mill Hill International to find out about someone from another country and write interesting details about them. The essays were fascinating to read: by interviewing each other, they have already found so many peculiarities about their lives which draw them closer together. In one essay a pupil wrote that, feeling lonely, she was approached by a boy in her boarding house who cheered her up, introducing her to his friends, blowing away her homesick blues. That is how we build our communities.
