The Making of Her. Clarissa Farr
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(perish the thought!) but who no longer wanted to be thought of as girls. At the time our protocol was published, we were hailed as having done something revolutionary in bringing gender identity to the surface and allowing gender choice. But it was much simpler than that: we had just enlisted the support of the students to tackle a new issue on which they were well informed and thus, with the contemporary perspective and longer experience combined, created a policy. There is no knowing what my own headmistress would have thought about gender identity, though I remembered how over a much less significant issue some forty years earlier, she had taught me the importance of listening to your students, taking them seriously and giving real value to their opinions. Of course, the possibility of this highly personal and sensitive subject being raised and discussed in a mature way depended on trust and respect. I firmly believe that it was our particular character of openness as a girls’ school that made this potentially difficult conversation possible.
Half a millennium has passed since John Colet founded his school. Now his descendants, the Paulines and Paulinas, are preparing to go out into a world he could not have imagined. But the confidence and love of learning they take with them, their determination to fulfil their potential whatever the challenges, are qualities he would surely have wanted to encourage. His legacy lives on in them. Throughout the school, as I’ve been writing, the autumn term has been unfolding. Six or seven weeks have taken us well into the syllabuses for each academic subject, homework has been rolling in, society meetings have been happening accompanied by quantities of tea and cake, plays and concerts are in rehearsal and the results from hard-fought netball and lacrosse matches are being heralded. Probably there has been the odd behavioural incident and it is already clear which pupil (or parent) files are going to finish up on the bulky side by the end of the year. In a London school, the sense of the seasons is less strong, but it is still there – the evenings drawing in a little and the afternoon air smoky, even if from the remembered bonfires of childhood. Bowling along at full tilt, everyone is glad to reach the two-week October half term. What’s the difference between a two-week half term and a three-week school holiday, for example at Christmas? Answer: one week. And in this way, we have effectively by stealth introduced the four-term year, with the result that having had a proper break, there are fewer coughs and colds in November and December and we can normally get through the Christmas musical events without a mass epidemic of throat infections. I spend one week catching up, and the second away getting some country air with my family in Somerset, where there might even be an apple or two left to pick up.
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