The Master’s Speech Day Address Due to a late and unexpected change to COVID regulations, Speech Day had to be delivered virtually on the last day of the Summer Term.
James Dahl, 15th Master of Wellington, reviews the year, pays tribute to the work of pupils, parents and staff, and sets out his vision for the next decade. His speech was delivered in three sections, which were interspersed by short films depicting the rich variety of College life.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, members of the Wellington College Community, a very warm welcome to this year’s Speech Day film. To lose my first Speech Day as Master last year may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose my second, well, it’s not so much carelessness as immensely frustrating and I am truly sorry that we have been denied the opportunity to be together as a whole and entire community today. But, as we have aimed to do throughout the past 16 months, when life gives us lemons, we try our best to make lemonade, and I do hope this year’s film, put together in a week, goes some way to marking and celebrating one of the most remarkable years in Wellington College’s 162-year history. It was Otto von Bismarck who said that “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best”, and I think the same can be very much said of the educational world over the past 12 months, particularly the boarding sector, as Wellington College and schools like us have worked tirelessly and creatively, often within the context of ever-changing regulations to discover what is, indeed, possible and attainable, and to deliver, as successfully as we can, the next best. And so, I would like to begin this Speech Day message by acknowledging the Herculean efforts, innovation, and indefatigability of the entire staff here at Wellington over the past year. As I have said to many people over the past 12 months, judge not the culture of any organisation by how things are going during the good times, but by how the community responds in times of difficulty and crisis; and how proud I have been of the entire Wellington Community over the past three terms, particularly the manner in which the Teaching and College staff have risen to the challenges of 04
operating and delivering that unique Wellington experience in the most testing of circumstances. As well as continuing our normal day-today existence as a school, we’ve built and operated a second dining facility, sanitised every classroom and dining-table between every sitting, operated three different timetables concurrently, and reconfigured every classroom and department with more one-way systems and marquees than I ever thought possible. As well as being a school, we’ve become an exam board – setting, marking, standardising and moderating our own GCSE, A-Level and IB assessments, with teachers teaching in person and remotely throughout the year, very often at the same time, and we’ve had no choice but to become a mass testing centre and to design our own track and trace facility. One of my proudest moments was when the local Public Health England team phoned up Mr Walker, our Deputy Head Pastoral, to ask his advice, so impressed were they with the protocols and procedures which he and his team had put in place at the College.
Furthermore, we have supported hundreds of disadvantaged children by providing laptops to those pupils at our partner state schools without access to a device, through our Donation for Education scheme, as well as making five COVID recovery grants to local schools to supplement their work in supporting those children hardest hit by the pandemic. And I am proud that the College will be hosting a summer school in August for local primary school leavers ahead of their transition into secondary education to help bridge the gap which has emerged from the disruption of the past 16 months. At Wellington, we will never walk away from the responsibilities we have, not just to our own pupils, but to the wider education sector in this shared endeavour to support the young, who have been so adversely affected by the current pandemic. It has been an astounding team effort and, in line with our honorary sixth College value of gratitude which our Heads of College introduced this year, I would like to thank every member of staff here in Crowthorne, from cleaner to
