Speaking Up, Speaking Out
Happy New Year. As I look back on some of events of 2017, it has clearly been another great year for South Hampstead – the school’s best ever GCSE results, fantastic A Level results, all of which combined to place in 8th position in the Sunday Times parent power tables of schools in London and 20th nationally. We had nearly forty concerts, more teams and fixtures than ever before. We dominated local competition in cross country and netball, we put on the most beautiful Gym and Dance display. We won Robotics competitions, got Gold Certificates in the Chemistry and Biology Olympiads. We went on 110 different trips including to NASA, Russia and Iceland. Our co-curricular programme in the Autumn Term stretched to well over 100 different clubs on offer across the Senior School alone. We raised £22,000 for a school in Cambodia. We welcomed over fifty different speakers into school including a cabinet minister, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and two Olympic gold medallists. We consumed 23,000 cookies.
On the national and international stage, things were not quite so rosy. Mr Trump took office on 20th January and on 21st there followed the biggest demonstrations in American history, with huge participation from women outraged by his sexist comments during the election campaign. The wave of terrorist attacks across the U.K. and on the Continent continued with its grim roll call of British and European cities. Mrs May had a pretty challenging year with Brexit negotiations stalling until very recently, and the loss of her majority in the June General Election. She had a terrible Party Conference in the Autumn, where the letters fell off her autocue and she was paralysed by a dreadful cough. The Grenfell Tower tragedy which killed 71 people including children shocked us all because it opened our eyes to the cavalier way in which the poorest and most vulnerable in our society are treated. In November, the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, was accused of sexual harassment by what seemed like a never ending list of female film stars. A dark web of actresses silenced by Harvey Weinstein’s powerful associates who would go to extraordinary lengths to cover up the seedy reality of the film industry.
This is a theme brilliantly exposed by the fantastic Mary Beard, a GDST alumna of our sister school Shrewsbury High, in her new book Women and Power – a brilliant analysis of how we are culturally hard-wired, even to some extent in the 21st century, to regard public voice as the male arena. Speech in the Ancient World was the preserve of men and Silence the duty of women. Mary Beard talks about how over the centuries the message to women is always the same – shut up and put up. Well, the women of 2017 and Mary Beard herself, disagreed. In a fantastic meeting of minds between Mary and Hillary Clinton, the Cambridge academic spoke about why she was so vociferous in challenging the Twitter trolls who made horrific comments about her appearance. She challenges them and calls them out because she is fed up of people telling her just to ignore it, to write these people off as lunatics. She chooses to face them head on. Mary is an intellectual powerhouse, a brilliant classicist, and she embodies the spirit of pioneering feistiness that is so true to the GDST.
Another pioneering woman of 2017 is a much younger role model. Her name is Amika George and she is an A Level student at Henrietta Barnett School. She is the founder of the 2017 campaign to end period poverty. The issue came to public attention in March when it was reported that school girls in Leeds were routinely missing school because they could not afford sanitary protection. In a civilised country like Britain it is outrageous that tampons and sanitary pads should be seen as an unaffordable luxury product for many women. Amika has been campaigning for the government to make products freely available to young women in poverty so that they can stop missing several days of a school every month.
Women like Amika and Mary are pioneers. 2018 marks 100 years since Votes for Women in the U.K. and pupils will learn more about this seismic event from the History Department later this term. We are also delighted to be welcoming Laura Bates, founder of the Everday Sexism project, to South Hampstead later this term, as well as Dame Stella Rimington, the first women ever to be Director General of MI5 and a GDST alumna of another sister school, Nottingham High. In 2017 yet another GDST alumna, Cressida Dick (who went to Oxford High) became the first female Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. We are a feisty lot at South Hampstead and I look forward to hearing how Senior and Junior Feminist Societies and the Womanities Society will mark the centenary of Women’s Suffrage.
At the start of last term I urged our pupils to be flamingos amongst a flock of pigeons and to have pride in their own identify. My exhortation this term is to be Silence Breakers. I encourage all our students to speak out, speak up and to understand the power of their own voice, written and spoken. TIME magazine published this fantastic front cover of some of the women who fronted the MeToo campaign, women speaking out about sexual harassment following the Harvey Weinstein allegations. These women TIME magazine called the Silence Breakers.
South Hampstead is a school with a love of discussion and ideas at its very core. Whether they are quiet scholars or passionate campaigners, they love asking questions, challenging the status quo, making arguments, engaging with social issues. Bland isn’t really a word I associate with any of our pupils. I have really enjoyed listening to them debate in lessons with their teachers and with each other. They are all brilliant Silence Breakers.
I also recently suggested two possible New Year’s resolutions to our pupils. The first: to remember that the art of discussion is just as much about listening as about talking. The most charismatic people are often the best listeners because they make people feel valued. And the second is that you when you do speak, turn up the volume. If you have something worth saying, it’s worth saying audibly.
Finally, I want to mention one other campaigning issue I know many of our pupils will feel quite passionately about – the plight of refugees around the world. The reason I am mentioning this will become quite clear next time you step into our Exhibition Space. One of my most awe-inspiring moments in 2017 was sitting in my office chatting to a 2017 leaver about the work she was doing with Syrian asylum seekers. I remember thinking that I would never have had the confidence to do the same at her age. She is a great example of a Silence Breaker. In the Exhibition Space for the next half-term you can see an incredible exhibition of photographs called In Transit – Life in Northern Europe’s Refugee Camps. Two photojournalists, Jacky Chapman and Janine Wielder, spent time in the notorious camps in Calais and in Dunkirk in Northern France documenting the daily lives and struggles of refugees trying desperately to get to the UK. The photos are intimate, moving, inspiring as well as heart-breaking. These refugees had travelled thousands of miles across Africa, Asia and Europe, falling prey to people smugglers, risking their lives on a daily basis. Some of them had attempted to cross the English Channel thousands of times in hope of a better life here. The camps were closed down in 2016 but the plight of the refugees is far from resolved. I urge all our community to make time to visit the Exhibition over the next six weeks.
Blog post by Vicky Bingham, Headmistress from 2017 to 2023.