Ethos & Strategic Vision

Magnolian 2020/21 | From our Senior Leaders

From our Headmistress

I would like to concentrate my reflections on three Cs which have dominated news headlines over the past year and our response to these as a compassionate Christian and proudly feminist school Community (#YesSheCan) in Cambridge whose focus is education: the drawing out of truth and the healing of ignorance since ignorance is the nursery of prejudice and discrimination.

Schools are places of healing as well as education. These are: Covid and our response to lockdown; Campaigning and Championing including BLM in response to George Floyd’s death last summer and more recently Everyone’s Invited alongside the response to Sarah Everard’s death this spring; and thirdly, Climate Change.

Current context: Summer 2021

The global pandemic of COVID-19 and subsequent variants has raised to the surface old wounds including issues around race and the interaction of men and women. This has been a year of anger across society and in the media: it has been a painful time as we understand just how at odds with each other many have become (and I am not going to include Brexit in this reflection). Cultures have been degraded into contempt. This foreground has been set against a backdrop of deep devastation; normal life as we knew it has been completely interrupted: most significantly, we bear in our hearts those dear family members and friends who have died this year due to COVID or COVID-related illness but there has also been the pain and loss of social separation, furloughing, unemployment for some and the list of anxiety goes on. We are increasingly aware of the importance of mental health and wellbeing as well as physical health with ongoing concerns regarding obesity, healthy diet, exercise and lifestyle.

Our purpose as educators is to abide with the pain within our community and look with compassion at the present (#StillStMarys) and value the interruption, using the opportunity provided to discern, with hope, the future.

Since our return to the school site, pupils have reflected on their own COVID experiences and have shared both moments of positivity, hope and joy as well as points of sadness and despair, loss and grief, as well as remembering the things that brought us together as local communities such as the Thursday evening ‘Clap for Carers’ to celebrate our NHS staff and other key workers.

An alumna, Pastonian President and School Governor, Lucy Johnstone expressed the spirit of the moment beautifully in her introduction to the Easter edition of the Pastonian e-newsletter. It bears repeating:

“As we approach 23 March - a year since the UK went into its first national lockdown - I have been reflecting on how the constant change and uncertainty of the pandemic echoes the term ‘liminality’, a term originally developed in anthropological studies about rituals to conceptualise processes of change. The liminal space is a state of ambiguity, an in-between time that is neither here nor there; a space of temporary suspension from everyday norms.

This is exactly what we have seen in the last year with unpredictable and continuously shifting moments as the School has adjusted its provision of learning and teaching over the past year. There have been constant shifts during national lockdowns in which the School has opened and then closed; times in which teachers and pupils have engaged across a mixture of the online world of Microsoft Teams as well as in the classroom. This frequent change has demonstrated both great resilience and adaptiveness. As the UK now begins to emerge out of our third lockdown, I am optimistic that we will transition from such liminal periods to greater normality for the School and for our wider society.”

Lucy’s reflection is particularly resonant because our school’s Ignatian charism focuses on the liminal spaces which are occupied by the marginalised. This accounts for why the current papacy focuses on these issues.

Covid and our response to lockdown

One of the many things that COVID-19 has revealed is the importance of female leadership on the world stage. In the Autumn Term, I presented a deliberately slightly provocative assembly in which I put it to the girls that many of the countries with the most effective responses to COVID had women at the helm: Mette Frederiksen of Denmark, Sanna Marin of Finland, Angela Merkel of Germany, Katrin Jakobsdottir of Iceland, Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, Erna Solberg of Norway, and Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan.

Additionally, women around the world have also made an enormous contribution toward the effort to combat COVID-19 on the front lines (70% of the world’s health workers and first responders are women) and in STEM fields where they have been leading research into the virus, creating trackers and developing vaccines, including Dr Özlem Türeci, co-founder of BioNTech, which helped produce the first vaccine and Professor Sarah Gilbert, the Oxford Project Lead for the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine; do watch this very informative and inspiring video regarding the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine.

In the Spring Term, Spilios Theodoratos, the parent of a new joiner, who is Senior Data & Analytics Engineer at AstraZeneca Digital Health R&D wrote a wonderful blog that is worth re-reading. About the video, he emailed me: “The best part is that most of the key players are females! So yes, great future for women in Science a reality that I witness first hand here in AZ.” In the Summer Term, I proudly shared this recent article in a whole school assembly: role models and inspiration all the way!

This is why I am so very excited about the Junior School’s new STEM lab which will be completed over the summer holiday. I would ask that you all seriously consider making a donation - joining Jeffrey and Mary Archer who are lead donors, alongside alumnae who have so generously donated in recognition of the excellent teaching they received at St Mary’s. Teaching which enabled them to become the women they are today, pursuing interesting STEM careers in which they have found great fulfilment, in turn, through which they have enriched society.

We need our girls to be the next generation of compassionate leaders in STEM: our new STEM lab is an important contribution to address the ‘leaky pipeline’ by enthusing girls during their childhoods about their capability and the opportunities which are available.

We need our girls to be the next generation of compassionate leaders in STEM

Campaigning and championing

It has been notable that in social issues women continue to lead the way: previously we heard from Malala regarding the importance of education for all; in particular girls in under privileged societies. Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi started the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which has grown into a global network galvanised particularly by the death of George Floyd. The #MeToo movement was founded by Taran Burke to empower women around the world to speak up against sexual violence and harassment. Most recently, over the spring break this year, we noted the social media response to the tragic death of Sarah Everard accompanied by the ‘Everyone’s Invited’ UK platform started by Soma Sara. These issues and these women challenge us to think and to discern and to act. Our role as a Christian girls’ school is to discern what this means to us and looks like for our international community-based in Cambridge.

These issues and these women challenge us to think and to discern and to act.

We have always supported your daughters through our pastoral care programme which includes our PSHEE programme and our tutorial system. We hope that every girl feels that there is a teacher or tutor, nurse, counsellor, boarding staff member or Peer Counsellor to whom she can turn in school if she has anything that she wishes to discuss. We take student voice very seriously indeed and as a girls’ school wish to empower our students to be self-confident, reflective and compassionate young women.

We have also continuously sought your voice and views as our parent body about learning and welfare since March 2020 as a necessary aspect of fulfilling one of our school aims which is to supporting you our parents: and so have continued to walk in loving accompaniment with you in these challenging VUCA times of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.

Last summer, we listened to feedback from students and alumnae regarding BLM and undertook a curriculum review and planned for a fuller programme of activity during the Autumn Term as well as during Black History Month in February. This term we have been listening to our older students’ views about the alleged ‘rape culture’ in schools. We have also been listening to our own young women’s responses to lockdown, social distancing and online learning: the voice of neurodiverse students including those with introversion and autism has been helpfully amplified.

Having reflected and discerned, we wanted to do more. We worked behind the scenes during the Spring Term on important matters pertaining to Inclusion, Diversity and Equality and the Summer Term saw the launch of our Inclusion Committee which includes student representation, staff representation and governor representation (Judy Clements OBE).

This Committee has undertaken some heavy lifting this Summer Term and we made use of time in June to support some detailed work, fruits of which will become increasingly visible next academic year as we add our voice and encourage girls to become leading advocates to end inequality. Ultimately, we take this from the profoundly radical Christian perspective as expounded in the Gospels including in the Biblical verse which Spilios cited in his blog: Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”.

 

Climate Change

We all have a duty and responsibility to safeguard our planet and acknowledge the impact of climate change. In terms of climate change, once again, some of the most important environmental activists have been women: Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ is credited with launching the global environmental movement; today, Greta Thunberg is the most recognisable climate activist in the world. Girls’ education, research shows, is key to building greater environmental awareness and containing climate change. This year marks the fifth anniversary of ‘Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ call to listen to the ‘cry of the earth and the cry of the poor’. The Papal encyclical drew attention to the precarious state of the Earth, our common home, called us to be stewards of God’s creation and aimed for Ecological Education within schools, making a ‘change for good’ and to help ‘protect all life, to prepare for a better future, of justice, peace, love and beauty’.

Five years on, a covid pandemic and three lockdowns later, Pope Francis’ words remain more relevant than ever: “Education in environmental responsibility can encourage ways of acting which directly and significantly affect the world around us, such as avoiding the use of plastic and paper, reducing water consumption, separating refuse, cooking only what can be reasonably consumed, showing care for other living beings, using public transport or carpooling, planting trees, turning off unnecessary lights, or any other number of practices."All of these reflect a generous and worthy creativity which brings out the best in human beings. Reusing something immediately instead of discarding it, when done for the right reasons, can be an act of love which expresses our own dignity. We must not think that these efforts are not going to change the world. They benefit society, often unbeknown to us, for they call forth a goodness which, albeit unseen, inevitably tends to spread. Furthermore, such actions can restore our sense of self-esteem; they can enable us to live more fully and to feel that life on earth is worthwhile.” Additionally, this year the UK will be hosting the delayed UN climate conference COP26.

Our eco-group has been strongly productive throughout the pandemic including lockdowns 1, 2 and 3 offering creative opportunities to generate solutions at home as well as at school. Our digital strategy which has come to the end of its second 2-year plan has delivered on a vision towards a near paperless community in which photocopying has been reduced and savings ploughed into the upgrading of Senior School teacher devices for better delivery of teaching in-person in the classroom and online.

We have looked more broadly at sustainability and again have done some heavy lifting via a Sustainability Committee comprising pupil advocates, staff and governor involvement – our plan will be officially launched in the Autumn Term. Additionally, Year 9 undertook a powerful piece of work on sustainability as part of their enrichment and cross-curricular studies during our inaugural June Jubilee Jamboree. Ely Cathedral’s ‘Heaven & Earth - The World in Our Hands’ July Festival aims to raise awareness, educate and inspire us all to protect our world. This event will feature exhibits with a focus on climate change plus talks on environmental issues: St Mary’s has produced a range of creative outcomes which will be on display during July.

In conclusion and in gratitude

I would like to take the opportunity to formally thank my teaching and support staff colleagues for their dedicated professionalism this term as well as throughout the time since school’s entered formal lockdown in late March 2020.

I would also like to thank our governors for their support. We are blessed by the increasingly diverse voices on our board as well as by their engagement with the executive in the creation of strategy and supporting the leadership and management of that vision and the fulfilling of our school aims. We conclude our current 3-year School Development Plan this summer and in the autumn we will be launching our next 3-year plan.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge again the emails of gratitude that have been sent into school by so many of you with such generosity of spirit: all have been shared with colleagues to lift their spirits throughout this time of uncertainty.

One of our school aims is to walk in loving accompaniment with our parent body and I am fully satisfied that we have been so doing throughout this term and our bonds as a community have grown yet stronger as we have been through the refiner’s fire and tested.

Charlotte Avery

Summer Term, 2021

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Reflecting on the year

"One of our school aims is to walk in loving accompaniment with our parent body and I am fully satisfied that we have been so doing throughout this term and our bonds as a community have grown yet stronger as we have been through the refiner’s fire and tested."

Charlotte Avery, Headmistress

“The teaching staff have managed the demands of simultaneous on-site and remote teaching wonderfully, the support of parents has been unstinting and, of course, the girls have been magnificent!”

Mark Johnstone, Bursar

“2020/21 has meant a time of great challenge but, alongside the challenge, it has also been an exciting time in seeing how the school has evolved in its use of digital tools, probably a number of years before we would have otherwise done so. It is an exciting time to be in teaching as we see new possibilities and opportunities for online and hybrid learning but the most wonderful aspect is to be back in school together for this.”

Mr Mallabone