Fionnuala Kennedy
Head
4 July 2025
The theme for Speech Day this year is ‘Encounters’ – an exploration of the meetings that we have with one another in sometimes unexpected circumstances.
And so, to an encounter that I had at another of our Wimbledon High annual gatherings, our School Birthday Assembly on 9th November.
We love celebrating the school birthday. It is a real highlight for us: the youngest and oldest students get to cut a big birthday cake, we sing Happy Birthday To Us, and the Head Girl cites a piece of writing from the first Headmistress Edith Hastings, in which she exhorts us to be ‘proud of the spirit and character of the School, or what is sometimes called the tone of the school.’ We are, Edith, I promise you; we really are.
The school birthday is also the first time in the academic year that our Reception girls come into a whole school assembly, the thinking being that for a four-year-old to enter a room and encounter approximately 1200 people singing, playing trumpets, dancing, and raucously shouting ‘Unconquered Peaks’ at the top of their collective voice, is probably a bit overwhelming in the first few weeks of school. It’s quite a moment, and we all love it as Reception troop in wearing their green tracksuits, looking a little bit excited, a little bit daunted, sometimes skipping, invariably wide-eyed.
This year as they settled down cross-legged on the front row, a particularly small, small person from Reception, who happened to be sitting directly in front of me, extended one hand and, rather imperiously I must say, beckoned to me with her tiny finger. Never one not to respond to a summons from a Junior School pupil, over I went and duly bent down.
“Excuse me, Lady,” she said.
“Yes?” I answered.
“What are we doing here?”
Well, that question has been on my mind ever since November and it is probably the most profound one I’ve been asked all year, with no offence meant either to my senior team or my A Level literature class.
What are we doing here?
And how can that question, that encounter between a Head with a lot to learn and a very, very wise four-year-old, help us to understand not only the point of school, but of the best sort of education, and the mission we have at the heart of Wimbledon High and of the GDST.
On deciding the theme of Encounters for Speech Day this year, the senior production of ‘Into the Woods’, performed earlier this year, was very central to our thinking. As a fan both of Sondheim and the history and re-workings of fairy tales, I can’t say I was disappointed by this decision. We know that fairy tales and indeed literature more widely are chocka block with encounters.
You can’t move in poetry without stumbling upon a garrulous ancient mariner, or a traveller from an antique land wanting to tell you an outlandish story.
Literature allows us to encounter strange countries and unfamiliar places without moving from our sofas; and even better, we get to encounter characters unlike any we’ve ever met – Bertha Mason, maybe, or the BFG, or Caliban – and even better, witness them encountering each other.
We also know that fairy tales, ridden as they are with dark warnings of what can happen when and if good little girls stray from the path laid out for them, prepare us for the fact that wolves exist, and of the dangers that we might encounter when we head into the metaphorical dark and thorny woods.
And whilst I’d tend to advocate deliberately leaving the path whenever you can, that of course is assuming that the path ahead is clear in the first place; and I don’t know anyone for whom that is the case at any time in their life, let alone when they are young.
So, back to our wise Reception girl: what are we doing here?
Well, in this school, what we’re doing here is helping our young girls and women, whether age four or about to stride out like our amazing Year 13s, to approach the unexpected, the chance encounter, the twists of the path and the unseen shadows of the woods, not with fear or trepidation, but with excitement and curiosity, knowing that they have everything they need to deal with whatever comes their way.
Some encounters will be exhilarating: meeting life-long friends and soulmates for the first time, and just clicking with them; encountering ideas and writers and thinkers who elevate our way of thinking; experiencing new cultures and countries and people as we travel the world; but other encounters will be more along the lines of the Billy Goats Gruff – a story I used to find absolutely terrifying as a child – where trolls lurk under bridges, trying to stop us from reaching the verdant meadow on the other side. And it’s these encounters for which the best education prepares you: the scary, unplannable, threatening and chance encounters; things we didn’t anticipate and can’t initially control but from which we must and do learn.
When I think of this generation, of course they’ve all faced such an encounter already, during the pandemic – and we watched them adapt, showing stoicism, resilience and creativity in their responses.
So school must be a place which allows us on a daily basis to flex and develop our muscles of encountering and outwitting trolls of all sorts, be they maths problems we can’t solve, friendship betrayals and even heartbreaks, failing to achieve a dream we have long held, and – perhaps hardest of all – encountering within ourselves shadowy characteristics which we must work to harness and keep in check. And, to my mind, girls’ schools in particular must actively cultivate and then jealously guard an atmosphere where students have the courage to make mistakes, who understand that they are part of a rich history, a continuum, of brilliant women who took risks and were willing to fail in order to live enriched and intellectually dazzling lives, and who then offered that chance to other girls and women – we mustn’t forget the animosity and downright aggression the founders of this very school encountered when they took the courageous and controversial step to offer academic education to the girls of SW19.
And, perhaps most importantly of all, all of these aspects of the best sort of education – the what of what we are doing here – prepare our young people to take on the bigger trolls of the adult world, to tackle prejudice and ignorance, to champion others who need our support, to use those magnificent brains of theirs and all they have learnt here to make the world just a little bit more Wimbledonian, in whatever way they can. And why do I think that’s necessary? That the world doesn’t just want, but needs Wimbledonians?
Well, let’s end where we started, as all of the very best storytellers do, with another encounter from earlier this year, this time back at our Open Day in September. I was lurking, at the bottom of the Steam tower between speeches, attempting to encourage visitors into Physics 1 where the team were doing something mysterious to do with a disappearing test tube. A prospective father stopped for a chat and, on telling me he lived in Wembley, I asked him what on earth had brought him all the way out to SW19, when it would be such a crazy commute for his daughter to come to school here. Well, he said, I’m a surgeon and about six months ago I had a major emergency which would ordinarily require one, if not two, other senior colleagues to assist me. Unfortunately, the only person available was a box-fresh junior colleague whose services I called upon with much trepidation.
Yet this young doctor was unbelievable: calm, fearless, measured, immensely capable – and when I asked her afterwards where she had learned to cope with pressure like that, she said, quite simply, with humility, but as though it should be blindingly obvious:
‘I’m from Wimbledon High: that’s just what we do’.
So that’s what we’re doing here. And we’re going to keep doing it.