Alumnae Sophie Harvard Prize Book Featured Image

Alumnae’s Harvard Prize Book Award

Every year, The Harvard Club of the UK selects a book to award to an outstanding student at each of over 100 secondary schools. The Prize Book is awarded to ‘an outstanding student in the penultimate year who is academically excellent, exhibits exceptional personal qualities and makes a significant contribution to the school or community’. This year, alumnae Sophie Rudge  has been awarded the prestigious prize. Sophie, a 2021 Leaver,  is currently a sixth form student at the Leys where she is studying Maths, Further Maths, Greek and Latin. Well done to Sophie for this impressive honour.

 

Duke of Edinburgh Expeditions

In 1956, HRH Prince Philip launched a pilot for The Duke of Edinburgh’s  (DofE) Award. Today, the programme is available to any young person aged 14 to 24, with the mission of inspiring, guiding and supporting young people in their self-development and recognising their achievements. Young people choose a challenge under each section of the Award: Volunteering, Physical, Skills, Expedition and, for Gold participants only, Residential. These activities, undertaken over an extended period of time, lead to a Bronze, Silver or Gold Award. 

At Heritage, the Expedition sections of the Bronze and Silver Awards are delivered as part of our Outdoor Education Programme. During Senior Camp this year, Year 9 DofE participants finished their Bronze Qualifying Expedition while the Year 10s successfully completed their Silver Practice Expedition. Year 11s completed their Silver Qualifying Expedition in late June in the Shropshire Hills, walking from near Pontesbury to Llanfair Waterdine on the Welsh border. The expedition included medieval towns like Bishop’s Castle and Clun, as well as sections of Offa’s Dyke. Well done to all of those pupils who participated in this year’s Expeditions.

A Scenic Geography Trip

Year 10 Geographers spent a wonderful sunny day in Hunstanton recently conducting three coastal studies. First, the pupils measured the rate of longshore drift over a 20m stretch. This was followed by a beach profile study: investigating the different layers of the beach including the type of sediment, gradient, and cliffs. Finally, they investigated the effect of the groynes in Hunstanton, measuring the deposited sediment and more. All of the pupils worked very hard, and enjoyed their well-earned fish & chips and ice cream at the end of the day.

Year 10
Geography Trip

Fighting for our Own Attention

The bestselling book, Stolen Focus by Johann Hari begins with the author’s own  three-month experience of living screen-free and what he learned along the way. Here, Heritage parent Rachel Bruins shares her thoughts:

Stolen Focus made for a challenging read, rather relevant to Screen Free week! The statistic that university students are apparently only able to concentrate for 65 seconds, and adults for barely much longer at 3 minutes, is concerning. It reflects my own observation of myself. Hari addresses what has changed to shorten our attention spans and then goes on to suggest a number of ways we might ameliorate the situation. It is a fascinating book which the author has clearly well researched with numerous footnotes. 

If you’re like me, you probably blame your electronic devices for any declining attention span you see in yourself. Hari started there, but came to realise that is only part of the problem, which is deeper and transcends these gadgets. 

Spoiler alert: Additional factors the author points to include the way we short change ourselves of sleep, the negative effects of pollution, the fact we don’t let our minds daydream enough, our failure to undertake activities which absorb and distract us (such as doing a puzzle or painting a picture), apps whose developers are paid to make them addictive and ever present, and the fact we allow our children little freedom to play unsupervised these days. 

This book is well worth a read. Perhaps a good choice for Screen Free Week?

Rachel Bruins, Year 5 and 9 Parent and HCA Co-Chair

Get Ready for Screen Free Week

A Message from Headmaster Jason Fletcher

During the third week of June, we will be holding our Heritage Screen Free Week. It is usually an annual event, which had to be set aside for the past two years, but one which is now more necessary than ever, given the way the pandemic has affected our lives. Now that life is returning to something more like normal, we are pleased to be resuming the tradition once again.

The idea is that from 8am on Monday morning the 13th of June until 8am on Monday the 20th of June, families commit to not using their televisions, computers, video game consoles, tablets and smartphones. It is intended to be a total ‘digital detox’. (We accept that use of phones and computers may be necessary for work and essential communications by adults; pupils should not have access to their smartphone, if they have one.) 

This idea will seem alarming —even impossible—to many of us because our devices are so deeply embedded into our lives. There is no denying they are useful. The problem is that they are captivating. They can stop us from giving our whole attention to the things that are right in front of us, or prevent our children from ever feeling bored (a necessary condition for creativity), or disconnect us from those closest to us while relentlessly beckoning us with electronic messages from many others. And digital entertainments are displacing so many enriching activities. 

Screen Free Week is an opportunity for us each to pause and examine whether technology has too big a role in our lives. Can we live happily without screens? 

We are eager to hear about your experience of Screen Free Week. What impact does it have upon your family and your children? What books did you read? What places did you explore? What projects did you start, or finish? What interesting conversations did you have? I would love for you to start thinking about Screen Free Week with a sense of anticipation, even liberation! It’s only a week, but maybe it will lead to changes that last longer.