I wonder how your summer holidays have been?  As I look back over the last 6 weeks there have definitely been some highs and lows.  The principle low being a bout of Covid, whilst the highs have involved lots of golf with my two boys. I now play a very different form of golf and I heard myself saying to my son the other day that one of the key ingredients for a positive round is starting well. Often you can walk on to a golf course totally unprepared, having not hit any practise shots and if the first hole or two go badly you can quickly assume the posture of ‘today is a bad day’.  However the situation is the opposite if you ‘start well’.  I think this principle can be very easily applied to the start of a new academic year, particularly this one, with the stop start of the last 18 months and the loss of ‘normal’.  One hopes that as we start this new term, things will be more normal.  If we start it well, principally with the right attitude – keen to give, put in and make the most of it – then the rest of the year should follow in the same manner.

Let’s make it our aim to make this a really good year! I often think that for young people it starts with the small things – if we get those right the bigger things follow.  So let’s keep our bedrooms tidy and march forward with a hunger to make progress.