When Failure is an option

How do you feel when you fail something? And how do you pick yourself up from failure and try again? What lessons can we all learn from failure?

Such questions will be at the centre of ‘Failure Week’, which is running the week commencing 6th February at Wimbledon High School GDST. Whilst the initiative may sound unusual for a top performing girls’ independent school, the idea is to demystify the word and encourage the girls to put ‘failure’ into context and encourage them to face it head on and learn from it - hence calling it what it is and not dressing it up.

Spanning the Junior and Senior Schools, involving students from four to 18, Failure Week includes:

- Assemblies focussing on the subject of failure, with examples of successful people, including famous names and teachers, who have 'failed’ along the way

- Activities designed to assess how students feel about failure

- Tutors discussing the merits of failure, sharing a ‘failure’ they faced in their lives with their students and discussing how they came through it

- Explorations of the negative side of ‘not failing’; the importance of having a go and risking failure

- Emphasis on the pastoral network of support that underpins school life and can help when things go wrong

- Encouraging parents to discuss any ‘failures’ they have had with their daughters and what they learnt from them

The Headmistress of Wimbledon High, Heather Hanbury, came to teaching after a successful career in Management Consultancy and is adamant that success and satisfaction in life can come from ‘daring to fail and daring to get it wrong’:

“My message to girls is that it is better to lead a life replete with disappointment than one where you constantly wonder ‘if only.....’. The examples I use include: ‘If only I'd tried out for the first team, I might have been selected’. ‘If only I'd applied for that job, I might have been successful’. I want to suggest to girls that it is acceptable and completely normal, not to succeed at times in life.

“‘Failure Week’ complements what we do throughout the school, which is to encourage our girls to be courageous and to take calculated risks. We give our students plenty of support and opportunities to try new things in and outside the classroom. For high achieving girls especially, where the fear of failure can be crippling, this intellectual resilience and robustness is vitally important. Successful people learn from failure, pick themselves up and move on. Something going wrong may even have been the best thing that could have happened to them in the long run – in sparking creativity, for instance - even if it felt like a disaster at the time.”

ENDS

Note for Editors

Wimbledon High School is one of 24 schools and 2 academies in the GDST network. www.wimbledonhigh.gdst.net

www.gdst.net

For further information please contact:

Rachel Brewster
Marketing Director
Wimbledon High School GDST
Tel: 07811 360971