ESMS Development Office and Community Update

An update on ESMS community activity during the unique year, from Suzi Squires and the Development Office.

As with all parts of the school in the last 12 months, the Development office has had to adapt and change its planned activities for the year. The usual schedule of family ceilidhs, quizzes, reunions and career-based events were set to one side whilst we worked out the best ways to support the wider ESMS community through various lockdowns and restricted access. We firstly launched a neighbour helping scheme, predominantly in Edinburgh but also looking to assist elderly or isolated alumni wherever they were in the world. We had lots of young alumni, parents and pupils volunteer their assistance in fetching groceries and essentials for those who were elderly or shielding. We spent a week or so looking into how we could help to support our community in various ways during the lockdowns, tested various different technologies which could help us to bring activities to the community and spoke to a wide range of teachers and other school staff to see what they could help us to bring to the community. We then launched a blog (www. esmscommunity.org) to be a hub for all our planned activity. This was initially a temporary website but it’s been such a success and so popular that we’ve decided to maintain it all year round now. We launched several initiatives that ran throughout lockdown: • Twice weekly digital coffee mornings featuring a wide range of speakers from the ESMS parent and alumni community. • A weekly quiz for children during the daytime • A weekly community/family quiz for everyone • A weekly singalong • A weekly photography competition • We linked pupils with alumni to exchange letters in a pen pal type scheme • We shared jokes, baking, recipes and generally positive news from the ESMS Community, including a lockdown wedding, several promotions and new roles for alumni • We facilitated a couple of special digital events, like the Peboryon bakealong! Life started to open up as we went into the summer, we paused the coffee mornings, singalong and weekly children’s quizzes. The community/ family quiz remained very popular and in demand so we ran this monthly during the summer and autumn to give families an opportunity to spend some time together on a regular basis and have some fun. We also continued the photo competition and introduced an art competition for the summer break to help parents keep children occupied. During the autumn term, a large amount of our time was spent preparing for our Remembrance Day. This was supposed to have been an exhibition of school, alumni and family memorabilia in the Dean on the weekend following the 11th but due to the restrictions on gatherings, we had to change our plans and launch this digitally instead. We owe a great debt of thanks to both School Captains, Lily Burgess and Conrad Derbyshire, and their friends as they spent much of their October break recording themselves reading out transcripts of testimonials from alumni and from our archives for the montage. Thanks are also due to our amazing archivists and the MES Guild archivist who spent a lot of time researching some interesting stories from the archives to bring to the community. The end result was a stunning tribute to those who served in the war and those who served to support the war effort at home. It gave context to their efforts whilst paying tribute to their sacrifices. The video can still be viewed here:

https://youtu.be/R5o7zaogIPI.

November also saw the first ever digital Inspire Lecture. Attendance was up and we had alumni tune in from around the world to hear leading female polar explorer, Felicity Aston, talk about some of her experiences exploring in extreme climates and leading expeditions too.

We also found time to start a new initiative in the autumn term – video interviews with alumni in a range of careers. The first two videos were with alumni whose businesses had been significantly impacted by the lockdown – a baking company and a magician! Christine Jensen, MES 1992 leaver, owns and runs Peboryon Cakes with her husband Phil. They usually provide wedding and celebration cakes, not just for people in their local area but they also undertake large sculpture cakes which are sometimes featured on TV programmes, such as Extreme