In her autobiographical novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the famous 20th century American novelist Betty Smith writes about her experiences in a grim state school in New York, describing the visits from a couple of Art teachers as “the gold and silver sun-splash in the great muddy river of school days.” The joy and…
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Try thinking of a leader who has inspired you. It’s harder than you might think, perhaps because we initially try to conjure up someone of the calibre of Martin Luther King Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi. But on a more modest scale, there are a number of figures who serve as role models, perhaps ones we…
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Click here to read this article in Spanish / Click aquí para leer el artículo en español At the start of this century, social media as we know it was still in its embryonic stages. If someone had said back then that politicians would communicate via tweets, most of us would have dismissed the idea as…
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Infants arriving at King’s College Chamartín on a sunny autumn morning in Madrid found themselves transported instead to the jungles of Africa. Met by the call of the wild from the Swinging Safari’s Wimoweh, it didn’t take them long to get into character, dressing up as alligators and lions and hammering out a number of…
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There’s a bit in Zoe Heller’s shortlisted Booker Prize novel Notes on a Scandal when the protagonist Sheba says, “It’s probably a good thing that your kids turn into difficult adolescents. The feelings you have for them as infants are much too intense, too enervating, to sustain.” She is referring to her 17-year-old daughter Polly…
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“This is the first time we’ve talked to each other,” says Sophie. “It’s because we are doing an activity. In the other sessions no one said anything, though a couple of the younger students have stopped to say hello to me in the corridor.” Sophie is a prefect and she is one of several…
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Every 40 seconds someone takes their own life. That is the shocking statistic that the World Health Organisation wants to focus on this October 10, World Mental Health Day, 2019. With poor mental health particularly prevalent among teenagers and suicide the second leading cause of death among 15 to 29 year olds around the world,…
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If starting a new school can seem daunting, throw boarding into the mix and students are facing a double challenge, leaving them, it might seem, with nowhere to hide when the going gets tough.In fact, one of the reasons people used to pack their children off to boarding school was precisely to toughen them up;…
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As school term gets underway, many students will try to liven up the year ahead with a number of extra-curricular activities that will broaden their experience and quite possibly their circle of friends. Extra-curricular activity has long been a tradition in the world’s best academic institutions and in recent years many parents have been filling…
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Technology is often blamed for making our world more individualistic and there is a popular belief that Millennials and those coming up behind them are increasingly self-centred and unaware of the challenges facing others.But, according to data from the World Gallup Poll, there has been a significant rise in youth volunteering in a number of…
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