Join us for our Virtual Sixth Form Open Evening from Thursday 4^th November 2021 onwards! Click here to find out more

There is an imperative now for us to ‘build back better’ after the challenges of the last twenty months. In the words of Apple’s Chief Executive, Tim Cook:

“The side-lines are not where you want to live your life. The world needs you in the arena.”

This is a global necessity and is far from limited to us in the UK. Educationalists from the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, India, Europe et al have the same themes preoccupying them too: a desire and a need to focus more on social and emotional skills, on values and on character development; a more flexible and less examination-driven curriculum; the positive use and the regulation of technology; cross-sector collaboration and partnership; equity, inclusion and mutual respect; student and staff well-being; the encouragement of student voice, creativity and responsibility.

I followed the compelling account of Pip Hare as she vividly described her participation in the non-stop round-the-world solo yacht race, the Vendée Globe. Earlier this year, she became the eighth woman ever to finish the race, which lasts about ninety days over a distance in excess of 24,000 miles. She spoke of how she overcame her anxieties through self-talk, beginning every day (after snatched bouts of sleep, rarely lasting more than 40 minutes) with three questions: Am I safe? Am I heading in the right direction? Am I going as fast as I can?

Pip is already preparing for the next Vendée Globe in four years’ time, determined to do even better. We could apply her three questions to our own and our children’s lives as we emerge from the pandemic. It is, however, not just speed that will get us over the finish line, and, after the rigours of the last twenty months, we might want to rephrase the final question: Am I pacing myself?

 Another difference, of course, is that we don’t sail alone.

Stay well and safe.

Be kind to yourself and others.

Best wishes,

Dr Bird

Alongside all the staff at HGS, who have worked hard over the last couple of weeks to ensure that our school is ready for a new term, I want to formally welcome you all to Prizegiving 2021. It is great to be back – albeit in a scaled back way.

A special welcome to Professor Cameron who will say a few words and present the prizes shortly:

Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive of Aston University

Grammar School Boy – Captain of School and Captain of Rugby

University of Sydney – University medal 1986

Rhodes Scholar – Oxford – Doctorate from the Robotics Research Group – Rugby Blue

Harvard Business School 2015

Aston 2016

2018 one of 5 candidates for the Guardian University Award for the most inspiring leader

2020 The Guardian University of the Year

27 students to Aston this year and 6 First Class Honours Degrees by HGS students

Although we have rightly relaxed COVID restrictions around the site in terms of no longer having bubbles, we are still very conscious that your lives at school will not be like the days you experienced before the pandemic. Your wellbeing and health is central to our plans for this year and we still have some precautions in place that will be familiar to many of you.

Last year was at times a very strange experience. We were surrounded by Covid information signs, one-way signs and floor markings, had to navigate changing Government advice, had to manage the move away from exams to Teacher Assessed Grades, were required to wear masks, and had numerous restrictions on socialising. However, as I worked alongside some quite remarkable colleagues in the thick of it, I kept reminding you (and myself for that matter) of a mantra that I have used a few times in the past but somehow resonates so strongly with the past 20 or so months.

What I explained was simple: success in life is measured not by how high you fly, but by how well you bounce. It’s about how well you come back from adversity and upset, and how you don’t ever let the fear of failure stand in your way.

HGS and our wider community of the King Edward VI Foundation and you, the students within it, have this last year bounced back with immeasurable boldness and flair. You have collectively proved to be the most adaptable and resilient of people, impressing your teachers at every turn with your constant determination and can-do attitude. I have previously said that we shape our surroundings, and then our surroundings shape us. Clearly, I was in part referring to the buildings in which we study and learn be that Big School or the Sixth Form Centre. We are fortunate to have a wonderful blend of the old and the new on our site. Indeed, this year we will be celebrating our 160^th Anniversary and it should not be forgotten that HGS is Birmingham’s oldest Grammar School. But dig deeper, and I’m referring to something far more cerebral than that.

Stones and cement, lime and mortar act as a mould to the understanding of our place in history.

But it’s how we mould ourselves, as people, as individuals, which ultimately moulds our surroundings and, in turn, how we mould each other.

You are all HGS students. What does that mean?

It means that you are expected to work extremely hard. Your teachers and I will never accept mediocrity.

We will never be satisfied with the satisfactory.

It means that we expect you to have a love of learning, to be inquisitive, to be positive.

But most importantly, in addition to hard work and determination to achieve exceptional academic results, it rests on five values.

You will be constantly reminded of these in the months and years ahead. You’ll find them on posters, forming part of your learning and the House System and they will serve as a foundation for how we believe you need to live your life at school, and how you subsequently live your life when you leave.

Community, Aspiration, Respect, Endeavour, Service.

HGS CARES.

If you embrace these values, if you show ambition in everything you do, whether it is in Geography or Football, if you keep resilient and determined whatever challenges life throws at you, if you’re humble and can walk with Princes and Paupers, if you show love and care and kindness in all your dealings, and if you can really support others in their darkest of moments by showing compassion in your words and your actions, you will not just simply be a fine young person, you will be a role model to others – a true Handsworth Grammar student who leads by example. A force for good through your actions and deeds, which will stay with you your entire life.

A word about exam results:

A Level and GCSE Exam Results Summer 2021

As a school we have had to endure (and I use the word endure quite deliberately for another year) a disrupted Examinations season which has been (again) full of uncertainty and mixed messages from Ofqual, JCQ and the various Examination boards. We have navigated our way through the maelstrom and we have acted with compassion, fairness and kindness throughout with our student’s best interests at heart.

At A Level nearly 45% of all entries were A*A grades, 70% of all entries were A*A B grades with an overall pass rate of 99.8%. Nearly 40 students attained all A* A grades and 60 students attained all A* A B grades or higher.

At GCSE we enjoyed an overall pass rate of 99.8%. 33% of entries were at grade 9 to 8, 62.1% at grade 9 to 7, 87% at grade 9 to 6, 97% at grade 9 to 5 and 99.8% at grade 9 to 4. Our Progress 8 score was 0.91 and our Attainment 8 score was 72.2.

Our teachers and support staff have worked tirelessly throughout the pandemic to do their best for the students in their care – whether in school or at home. Not only have they provided a high quality of creative teaching, both online and in person, but they have shown the greatest concern for the well-being of those in their care.

A word about activities outside the classroom:

Charities supported are:

Birmingham Age UK, BID Services, The Trussell Trust, Children in Need, Cancer Research UK, Comic Relief, Parkinsons’, Woodland House Birmingham Women’s Hospital Charity, Let’s Feed Brum, Royal British Legion, Movember, Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust, Guide Dogs for the Blind.

We cracked the Enigma Code using a raspberry PI and secured a Computer Science Digital Enterprise Award.

We held Digital Concerts – fantastic!

Music and LAMDA results – fantastic too!

Clubs and Societies slowly coming back – Tropical Fish Club!

Art, D of E Expeditions.

SF Rewards Trips, Cannock Chase, Twycross Zoo, W Lakes.

At KEVI Foundation Athletics Competition our Year 7 4x100m Relay team won Gold!

House sport was back as part of the House Cup competition – Cricket, hockey, Athletics, Handball, TT and so on – Nelson!

Cricket T20 Finals.

Equality and Diversity Committee.

Biology and Physics Big Quiz – beating local rivals!

Site Update – D4, Wall art, façade, Stained Glass Window – 160^th Anniversary. Oldest (original) Grammar School in Birmingham.

Back in the classroom:

T&L Action Plan, KRC, Evidence based approach, Literacy AP, PD, CPD (collaboration and sharing BP), Reading Plus, Outreach.

Priorities, SDP, DDP, SEF, MERTL, CPD Plan – joined up thinking which puts:

People at heart of what we do at HGS.

I finish with the famous words of Theodore Roosevelt, the 26^th American President between 1901 to 1909.  He promised the people of America fairness through his policy of the Square Deal. He wrote a piece called ‘The Man in the Arena’. It sums up our five values. It sums up the determination of someone who never lets the fear of failure stand in their way. It sums up the importance of bouncing back from adversity. It is about resilience and grit. It sums up what being a HGS student is all about.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

I wish you all a hugely successful, happy and enjoyable academic year.

Stay well and safe.

Be kind to yourself and others.

An excerpt from an article in TIME Magazine:

The two oldest uses of the word “like” in the English language are the adjective ‘like’ and the verb ‘like’.

In the sentence, “I like your suit, it makes you look like James Bond,” the first ‘like’ is a verb and the second is an adjective.

Today, these two ‘likes’ sound exactly the same, so most people don’t even notice that they are different words with separate histories. They are homonyms, in the same way that the noun ‘watch’ (meaning the timepiece on your wrist) and the verb ‘watch’ (meaning what you do with your eyes when you turn on the TV) are homonyms – each of two or more words having the same spelling or pronunciation but different meanings and origins.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that the verb ‘like’ comes from the Old English term ‘lician’, and the adjective comes from the Old English ‘līch’. However, the pronunciation of the two uses converged at some point over the last 800 or so years.

When I was at school, back in the Bronze Age, I had an English teacher who left a lasting impression on me. He once appeared in the classroom bouncing on a pogo stick. One of those children’s toys; a pole with handles, foot pegs and a big spring on the bottom. It was strangely compelling. As it turned out, he was surprisingly good at it, and managed to deliver the first 15 minutes of his lesson without once stopping or falling off. In fact, after a while, we stopped noticing the pogo stick at all.

Which, as it happened, was the point of his lesson. He was talking to us about a playwright called Harold Pinter, who often scripted weird things into his plays, knowing that audiences would come to accept them as normal after a while. I confess, I have never been brave enough to attempt public speaking on a pogo stick myself!

Neither have I ever forgotten something that teacher said to me in a lesson one day. He had just returned some essays to us, but mine was unmarked and without a single comment in the margins. The only feedback was the word YAWN, daubed in what appeared to be red paint across the front page. “Bird” he said as he threw it at me, “Interesting people use interesting words, dull people use dull words. There are one million words in the English language – you have no excuse to be boring.” It was another lesson I have never forgotten.

I did think he was exaggerating mind you. About the million words, not my linguistic laziness. I am pretty certain it was a deadly boring essay. Anyway, I went and checked and sure enough, English has the most words of any spoken language. 171,476 commonly used words, with a further 615,000 definitions. Add in approximately 50,000 Old English words that are now obsolete, and there you have it. Over one million English words!

In case you are interested the newest words to enter the English dictionary this year are: contactless, virtue-signalling, body-positive, and PPE.
The word “like” has two meanings. I like your suit. It makes you look like James Bond. Except now, for those lazy in their speech, it seems to have 3 other meanings as well. Apparently, it is now a quotation mark. I spoke to Mr Conway this morning and I was like “Mr Conway”. And he was like “Yes Dr Bird?” And I was like “Could you take Assembly next week? And he was like “Certainly.” And I was like… You get the picture.

Secondly, ‘like’ has become what is called a discourse marker, better known as a filler word. “Like, when you are not quite sure what you are going to say next so you, like, stall a little bit in your, like, sentence, so you can like, make some more stuff up.”

And if that wasn’t enough ‘likes’ to last a lifetime, it is also now used as an approximation. As in, “I have been thinking of having a rant over lazy language for, like two months now. It has been annoying me for, like, years.”

Of course, all those likes may seem perfectly reasonable to you. It is entirely possible that I have finally completely morphed into a pedantic, grouchy old word git. But in my defence, how is anyone supposed to understand a well-known celebrity when she uses all five versions in a single sentence? I quote:

Like, I like her dress but, like, it makes her look too like, old. But when I like, told her, she was like “No way” and I was like “Yes way.” And she was like “Really? And I was “Like, it adds like ten years.” Seriously. There are 999,999 other English words to play with; give a few of them a try.

Some languages are easier to learn than others, of course. There is debate about which is hardest; some say Mandarin or Cantonese. Mandarin Chinese is also the language with the greatest number of native speakers. The language spoken by the greatest number of non-native speakers is English.

But whether English is your learned, native, or only language, what I want to do is encourage you to master it while you are here. Because here are some more statistics:
Those of you who have grown up speaking English knew about 5000 words by the time you were 4 years old. By the time you were 8, that had doubled to 10,000 known words. On average, you have then carried on learning approx. one new word a day. Research suggests that you will keep on at that rate until you are in your forties, at which stage your vocabulary tends to stop growing. So that, by middle age, the average adult speaker of English knows and uses about 25,000 – 30,000 words. That’s less than 5% of all the words available to them.

Which means that even if you were born and bred speaking nothing other than English, you are not necessarily fluent. At least, not as fluent as you could be. That is why, even for those who are native English speakers, I encourage you to follow the example of your classmates from other countries and keep learning more of your own language. For the limits of your vocabulary are the limits of your world.

Even when you’re not speaking. Alone in your own mind, your thoughts come in sentences. Feelings, emotions, are instinctive, unshaped by language. But your thoughts appear in your head as words, albeit unspoken.

Therefore, the smaller your vocabulary, the smaller your ability to understand your world. I think it is a great sadness that native English speakers (and I daresay it is true in other languages too) reach a certain level of words they know and are comfortable with, and then fall into the habit of using only those phrases repeatedly. Settling for clichés, over-worn phrases, predictable patterns of speech. Lazy language, like “like”.

Hence why my old teacher’s words still haunt me today. Dull people use dull words. How others perceive you is largely defined by how you communicate. Given that most communication is verbal, that means that your vocabulary advertises your personality.
Grow your vocabulary and you grow your personality. If you are writing an essay or a report, don’t just use a dictionary, use a thesaurus. Find some synonyms. Put one of those “Word of the Day” apps on your phone. If you hear an unfamiliar phrase, don’t ignore it, Google it.

Even if you are just messaging online, don’t rely on banal emojis or fatuous acronyms. L.O.L. Use words. New words. Odd words. Eye-catching, show-stopping, juicy, full flavour words. Words that actually do make the person on the other end “laugh out loud.”

Another playwright I studied at school, Oscar Wilde, once finished a message to a friend by saying “I’m sorry I wrote you such a long letter, I didn’t have time to write a short one.” The point being, it is harder to conjure up a few judiciously chosen words than it is to just spew out endless verbal candyfloss. But so much more effective when you do. It’s, you know, like, seriously impressive.

Stay well and safe.

Be kind to yourself and others.

Best wishes,

Dr Bird