Ben Turner

Senior Deputy Head

26 September 2025

“The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes, the smoky towns and the winding roads, the green fields and the old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist.” 

George Orwell’s portrait of England, written in 1941 as bombs fell on London, is one of affection but also exasperation. It is ordinary, contradictory, even a little comic. But that was his point. England has never been a neat idea. It is messy, contested, full of tensions. And yet, Orwell believed it was worth defending — but only if it was continually worked on. 

That same tension lies behind the ongoing debate surrounding the St George’s Cross today. Walk through an English town and you may see red crosses stretched taut against the sky. For some, these flags are a harmless sign of national pride. For others, they have become an ominous signal, a warning that difference is unwelcome here. The same piece of cloth provokes pride in one heart and unease in another. 

Within our school community, we see how powerfully students engage with questions of identity and belonging when they surface in the classroom or in student-led debate. Symbols are never neutral: they spark emotion, disagreement, and reflection. Part of our role is to create the conditions not only for these conversations to happen openly and respectfully, but also for students to build resilience in themselves and their ideas as they practise respectful disagreement. 

The stakes feel higher now. Across Europe and beyond, the far right is on the rise. Economic anxiety, political disillusionment, and culture-war rhetoric have created fertile ground for movements that draw boundaries between “us” and “them.” In England, that climate collides with a longer history of uneasy national identity. The result is a convergence of forces: disenchantment with politics, the populist appeal of simple slogans, and the re-emergence of older anxieties about belonging. 

Education cannot afford to stand apart from this. The debates we read in the news inevitably filter into our classrooms and corridors, shaping how young people understand themselves and one another. That places a weight of responsibility on us as educators: not only to teach knowledge and skills, but to help students confront division, test their assumptions, and learn to be sure in their uncertainty. Certainty, after all, is often the enemy of understanding. And this responsibility does not fall on teachers alone. Families, schools, and neighbourhoods all share in the task of showing young people that identity can be lived generously, not defensively. 

In a recent Lower School PPE lesson, students were asked to imagine themselves stranded on a desert island. They debated survival, leadership, and how priorities might change over time. One student’s contribution struck me deeply: belonging, she argued, is not just about feeling safe — it is also about being productive. If people don’t feel they belong, they won’t pull together. It was a reminder that communities thrive when everyone has a place, and falter when some are excluded. 

That insight runs through so much of what we do at WHS. Our history curriculum refuses to settle for complacency — for the well-worn narrative that runs neatly from the Norman Conquest to Henry VIII to the Nazis. Our students deserve more. Explorations of the global exchange of ideas along the Silk Roads, the long and unfinished struggle for women’s suffrage, and the history of empire told from all sides give them a broader, more complex perspective. It is through these richer and more challenging stories that they learn to be discerning scholars and thoughtful citizens, capable of questioning the narratives they inherit. 

And the same principle shapes our partnerships. We do not shy away from complexity but lean into it; including in our work with HMP Downview, where students engage directly with women whose lives and experiences are far removed from their own. Because “all women” must mean all women, not just those who share similar backgrounds or circumstances. These encounters remind our students that belonging and solidarity are not abstract ideals, but practices forged across difference. 

Government policies often appear briefly in the headlines but leave their lasting mark in schools. The decision to lower the voting age to sixteen will mean that many of our students will soon have a voice in the democratic process. The preparation for that lies with us. In the contested climate we are living through, where politics is fracturing, identities are challenged and belonging is questioned, our role as educators and communities takes on new urgency. It must begin now: in classrooms, assemblies, and conversations that help young people understand agency, responsibility, and the habits of democracy. Changes to the PSHE curriculum, too, are debated at a political level but lived daily in schools, where teaching about relationships, identity, and respect can mean the difference between a young person feeling connected or isolated. 

If young people remain on a restricted diet of linear curriculum knowledge and the opportunities offered by their socio-economic context, we will never bridge the gap that division exploits. They need exposure to diverse ideas, perspectives, and experiences beyond their everyday lives. They need to learn how to be secure in their uncertainty: to question their assumptions, to seek out different voices, and to practise openness rather than defensiveness. 

History shows us that national symbols have always been contested. As historian Linda Colley argues, British identity was never built in isolation but forged in opposition to an “other”: Catholic Europe, France, Nazi Germany. For centuries, flags have been rallying points that define “us” by resisting “them.” That dynamic has not disappeared. Today, the “other” is no longer a foreign army but immigration, multiculturalism, or a political class accused of betrayal. As Robert Colls reminds us, England has never been a singular entity. It has always been fractured: rural and urban, Protestant and Catholic, elite and popular, nostalgic and forward-looking. The Cross of St George reflects those tensions rather than transcending them — and that need not be a weakness. It can also be a source of vitality, a reminder that Englishness has never been fixed but always contested, continually argued over, and endlessly reimagined. 

That is why schools and communities like ours matter. With almost forty nationalities represented in our Senior School alone, we see daily that diversity is not a weakness but a strength. It reminds us that identity is not something fragile to defend, but something rich to share. And it gives us opportunities to practise what it means to belong together, even when we come from different places and perspectives. If, as Orwell once wrote, England is “an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past,” then perhaps its endurance lies precisely in that capacity to adapt — to absorb new ideas, welcome new voices, and redefine itself in ways that strengthen rather than divide. The real question is not what the flag means today, but what we want it to mean in the future — and whether we are willing to do the work to make that possible.