Celebrating Success
At the start of term, we held our annual prizegiving evening, a ceremony to celebrate academic achievement and co-curricular contribution to the school.
Prizewinners and their parents were invited to an evening to celebrate an array of scholarly efforts and endeavours. As Mrs Bingham outlined in her opening address: “Underpinning these official events is a whole culture of celebrating success… It’s about the quiet word in class or in the corridor from a teacher or a tutor; it’s about an encouraging comment in a report or on a piece of work. Confidence is one of the biggest gifts we can give our students – not arrogance, not hubris, not complacency – but confidence. It’s not about the glory of the event or how much bling or book tokens a student collects. It’s about feeling recognised for their achievements… our aim is for all our young women to leave us as emotionally intelligent as they are academically intelligent.”
We were delighted to welcome alumna and literary critic Lara Feigel as our guest speaker for evening, who delivered a beautifully philosophical address on what we gain from success and prizes. Reflecting on what advice she would give her younger self, she said she would: “Be prepared to unlearn much of what I’d already learnt, and be prepared to do this continuously forever… to study a subject I was most passionate about at university… not to worry too much about grades and prizes… to see myself as a feminist.” Highlighting the importance of doing things that really matter to you, Lara suggested: “There’s as much to be gained from failure as from success when learning about life.” She added: “Prizes gained today are hopefully the first step not to success but to realising a vocation.”
Lara is a literary critic and cultural historian teaching in the English department at King’s College, London. Her most recent book Free Women was published in March this year and is an investigation of freedom that’s part memoir and part biography of Doris Lessing. Lara is also the author of The Bitter Taste of Victory, an account of the experiences of twenty of the British and American cultural figures sent in to Germany after the war, and The Love-charm of Bombs, which is about five writers in London in the Second World War. She left South Hampstead in 1998 to study English at the University of Oxford, followed by a MA at University College London and a PhD at the University of Sussex.