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A message from the Chief Master

30 April 2015

In this hectic new world, there will be about 20 minutes between my writing this piece and its arrival in your inbox - like a good King Edward's boy, I like a race with a deadline. And as I write this, the boys in the Sixth Form and the Fifth Form are, at this very moment, on exam study leave, on the very first day of May. Indeed, the IB Organisation, no respecter of Bank Holidays, has arranged its first exam for Bank Holiday Monday. Such is the summer term of the 21st century.

So, exams do loom over all that we do, but even so we do what we can to ensure that exams do not consume our existence: there is more in heaven and earth. And that is proved by three major national successes that have taken place in recent weeks, two of them within the last fortnight. At the end of last term we won the National Schools Maths Challenge, for the first time ever. At the beginning of this term, the school Under 16 hockey team played for the first time in the national finals at the Olympic Hockey stadium. And, last weekend, the Schools' Challenge Team, heirs to a great tradition, were runners-up in the National Finals.

In these and many other ways, the boys here prove day by day that they are truly outstanding in their talent, achievement and niceness. And that's why it wasn't easy to declare my retirement for July 2016. I'll say this a thousand times between now and then, but I am proud of the boys in this school, what they do and what they are like, and proud of what the old boys of this school have done in the last decade to strengthen this school.