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Mrs Derrick's Blog
Prize Giving: Pride, Celebration and Reflection – how lucky are we?
On Monday evening, we will celebrate the wonderful achievements of our 2018 Year 11 cohort – both academically and socially! As part of my overview, I will speak about the responsibility of schools to prepare girls for a world that is increasingly complex and rapidly changing; the importance of developing skills beyond those required for academic qualifications. Our guest speaker, will also focus on the need for our students to have ‘space’ to think.
I am, however, reminded that no matter the challenges that face women in the future, in comparison to many other girls around the world, our students are significantly advantaged by being able to attend school at all, let alone achieve so much in their time with us. Indeed, we see and hear stories about this in the news regularly. This was something that featured heavily in the recent ‘Children in Need’ event, the Christmas festivities that are beginning to unfold, along with ‘Comic Relief ‘plans for 2019.
Over the last 15 years, the global community has made significant progress in improving the lives of girls during early childhood. In 2015, girls in the first decade of life are more likely to enrol in primary school, receive key vaccinations, and are less likely to suffer from health and nutrition problems than were previous generations – this is a wonderful achievement.
However, it is considered by many that there has been insufficient investment in addressing the challenges girls face when they enter the second decade of their lives. This includes obtaining quality secondary and higher education, avoiding child marriage, receiving information and services related to puberty and reproductive health, and protecting themselves against unwanted pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease and gender-based violence. Of the one billion young people – including 600 million adolescent girls – that will enter the workforce in the next decade, more than 90% of those living in developing countries will work in the informal sector, where low or no pay, abuse and exploitation are common.
The International Day of the Girl that took place in October, is used by the United Nations to rally people behind the cause of empowering girls worldwide so that they can have better education, better survival rates, better protection from child marriage and sexual assault and better health services. Under this year’s theme, ‘With Her: A Skilled Girl Force’, yesterday marked the beginning of a year-long effort to bring together partners and stakeholders to advocate for, and draw attention and investments to, the most pressing needs and opportunities for girls to attain skills for employability. It is really important that we are aware of this and we do our best to do something about it too.
As a school, we make a contribution to this agenda regularly, through discussions, debates and events in tutor times, assemblies and of course, our curriculum teaching. It would be good though, to get involved by raising awareness of the ‘With Her’ campaign, perhaps by starting on the main site: www.unwomen.org. Also follow @un_women Twitter and Instagram, and use the hashtag #dayofthegirl to engage in discussion with the many organisations committed to supporting girls and women around the world.
Our theme for the week is ‘Create order and structure to deal with matters and tasks’. I would advocate therefore, that time is given to creating a structure to deal with our drive to ensure we are aware of campaigns like this, but also to have a skilled worldwide female workforce. This does not just include academic qualifications but an understanding of the world around us, an empathy with others, and an ability to communicate well with all those around us. We will be doing just this, with our focus this week on welcoming our international partners from Hong Kong, engaging in the German exchange, participating in two Christmas events – Carols at Maidstone Museum and our annual Carol Service at All Saints Church and very importantly, our 6th Form Community Service project on Friday. There will be lots of ‘order and structure’ in order to deal with these very important events and their associated educational benefits – most of which are not academic but just as important! I have no doubt that the message from our Prize Giving will highlight this too. After all, Invicta is so much more than educational outcomes! As a result, it will be wonderful to celebrate every achievement of every single student. We are indeed, very proud of our 2018 GCSE cohort.
