Posted on: March 14th 2014
What a truly cultural experience Wednesday night’s International Evening was! It was amazing to see the vast array of foods and national dress on offer from our parent, pupil and staff community and I was, as always, super impressed with the attendance from our current and prospective families. Organising the event was no mean feat, and a huge thank you goes out to Mrs. Ellison and Mrs. Holt who worked extremely hard to make it happen, coordinating parents, musicians, staff and children as well as the colourful art project of all our national flags!
I’d like to give a special mention and thank you to our Icelandic, Scottish and Indian musicians who hailed from the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance in NW London, organised kindly by Gareth Smith, their senior lecturer. In addition, many thanks to Sarah Sabur who worked on the flag project with the whole school, our parents who cooked and supplied food for the event, our FoNH who kindly ran a bar to raise funds for Educaid, Nikki from Bellevue for her live tweeting from the event (I hope you all followed it!) and all the staff for their support in making the event such a success!
I think what the event signified for me was how fantastic it is to be a Head Teacher in London; a culturally rich and diverse community with so much of cultural significance at our finger tips. Our children grow up grounded and just ‘getting it’ and what I mean by that is referenced in the ‘Excellent’ category of the Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural aspect of our pupils’ education as outlined by the ISI inspectorate. Their criterion reads:
Through their lives in school, they have developed an easy approach to pupils of different nationalities and show conspicuous understanding of cultures other than their own. I guess it’s a by-product of a well-rounded education, where diversity is valued and immersed as part of our everyday lives and learning. I think we encapsulate the expectation described above in our pupils’ relationships and friendships, their approach to learning about nationalities, cultures and religions as well as in marking a range of events and festivals in our curriculum and assemblies. I have to say, teaching the KS2 pupils to Samba a couple of weeks ago in assembly, to mark the Rio Carnival, was a particular highlight of mine!I hope that our school continues to be as culturally diverse and as international as it is now, because to me it’s what makes life the most interesting and rich.
