Headmistress' Speech 2009:

Welcome to Prizegiving 2009 in which we celebrate the successes of the year and especially the successes of our GCSE and AL girls.
I am delighted to welcome Sir Mark Walport who is our guest speaker and who will present the certificates and prizes to the girls.
Sir Mark is the Director of the Wellcome Trust, which is the largest biomedical funding body that exists, and I am sure that you are all aware of its public education programme which supports free exhibitions and art projects, sponsorship of science book prizes, lunchtime talks, supper clubs and, what it describes itself, as Twitter and Facebook ramblings –every media type is there! I will give a fuller introduction before Sir Mark addresses us.  We are very pleased that you are with us and we look forward to hearing from you soon.

Prizegiving celebrates the culmination of five years and seven years of academic study at Putney, in many cases this is a far longer period of first class preparation for those who joined us in Lytton House.
In recent years we have been reporting our successes to you in many ways: through full-colour newsletters, on the website, in the national and local press and television, in FOPHS meetings, in Old Girls’ Open Days and Five Year reunions, in the Annual Fund Reception, in every Assembly.  The girls and you, the parents, will have heard of our successes in many ways already.  Now you have also seen a selection of them for 2008/9 scrolling in PowerPoint in front of you but there is so much that they achieve that it is impossible to cover every outstanding success tonight.

The girls achieve excellent academic results at every level in the school: at KS1 and KS2 with Lytton House being placed 6th nationally in the Sunday Times Parent Power publication last weekend and the second highest Junior Department in the Trust, the combined GCSE and AL results placed us 35th nationally and the third highest placed school in the Trust.  When you look at those results together, Junior and Senior, we are the highest consistently placed school in the Trust which is a magnificent reflection on the good work of the girls and their teachers throughout the whole school and we should all feel proud of this.
It is a different kind of emotion which brings girls back to visit us after they have left at the end of Year 13 and last week we were delighted to welcome back half of the leavers of 2004.  There is a very strong pastoral element at Putney and a unique family feel and it is this which continues to bond us together across the years.
We hope that the leavers of 2009 will also return….perhaps you ALL will do that.  Five years is a good time to get together again, you will have graduated and have started in your first job and there is a lot to talk about.
Facebook is fine but nothing beats actually seeing your friends again.
There were many press stories generated this week about how girls and young women should be realistic about their careers.  Some people have been saying that it may not be possible to be a perfect mother and to have a career. 
I don’t think any of us have yet met the perfect mother, or father, but if there is someone out there who admits they are perfect, we should love them to come and speak to us at PIE. 
Really, it is all about balance for mothers and fathers and children.  We all know that we balance our lives at different stages and can come in and out of work in order to get the best for our families.  It has been like this for decades and I am sure that we all have good examples of our own mothers and grandmothers who balanced their lives along with their husbands in this way. 
It is possible to do both – why shouldn’t it be?

Academic success is important, because it opens doors to the next stage and allows the girls to enter that prestigious university and start that popular course.  It is the gateway to higher education and the pursuit of interesting careers.
However it is only a small part of life at Putney:
This last year our Senior Choir toured and sang in Barcelona and were invited again to the Rotary “Youth Sings” Concert in the Royal Festival Hall.  We are easily the largest item and the most consistently appearing school choir in London, what a privilege to be able to say that you have sung there. 
Equally prestigiously, the Lytton House Choir reached the finals of the BBC Songs of Praise competition two years ago and now again this year they are down to the final 6, we look forward to the outcome.  Last year Lytton House held their first Gala Concert and absolutely packed this Hall with parents and performers….it was glorious to see and hear them perform.
Our international links are becoming very well developed with many trips abroad including our exchange with MGD School in Jaipur India. We have established a new link with China at Jin Yuan School in Shanghai which was set up by a delegation of Putney students during our study tour to Shanghai.
We visited Moscow and St Petersburg with the History of Art students and there were many other study trips abroad. Our Outlook Expedition students visited Malawi, Venezuela and Borneo.
We held our second Dance Show which was stupendous, relentless and brilliant, producing a combined audience of 450 over two days.
We were delighted that the Trust funded the refurbishment of our Library and very excited when Mr Nigel Newton the founder of Bloomsbury Publishing came to open the Library along with his two daughters Catherine and Alice, both former Head Girls.

Shortly I will mention our sporting successes. But let us just consider how character-forming is the process of taking part in sport for fitness and to compete in competition.
All sportswomen and every level will know that a major part of success is managing to deal with - far more failure, than success.
The keys to success are learning how to develop persistence, resilience, determination and knowing how to work with a team. Sportswomen develop strategies to cope with disappointments and then to overcome them.  Much of success is about learning from failures and disappointments, making a number of small improvements which, when added together, can make a big, ultimate difference when it matters.
You actually need to lose races in order to learn how to win the next time.  When it matters we need to have learnt how to dig in the middle of a race, when the body is screaming for you to stop.
Successful sportswomen will look back at why they failed, break it down into little steps, develop a strategy to see if they can make little improvements, and then put it all together to make - a big difference. 
To the supporter: positive criticism can be useful, but please don’t make people lose face, don’t make them feel small, encourage them to have another go.  Broaden a vision of success as one that masters all the little failures and turns it into one great victory.
If there is no fear of failure, because failure is part of success, then success is achievable.
At Putney we develop this and have much fun along the way.

So, Sport is storming here and there are many successes throughout the whole of the school.
In Lytton House we are the U11 Surrey Tumbling Champions, we came second in the Surrey U9 Netball championships, the U11 Netballers were second in the Trust championships, the U11 Gym squad came second on the UK Floor and Vault competition and the U11 A and B teams came first and second in the Surrey Schools League….phew!
In the Senior Department:
In Gymnastics:
In the Surrey Floor, Vault, Tumbling and Sports Acrobatics we achieved U13 and U15 medallists in all these competitions.
In U14 Trust Floor and Vault we were second.
In the British Schools Floor and Vault we reached the regional finals.
We are the U19 London Champions and the U13 came second.
In the British Schools National Finals the U19 team came 6th….quite magnificent!
In Netball we are the Trust Champions.
The 1st and U16 teams are Surrey Finalists.
We came 4th in the U16 South East Regional Finals and are semi-finalists in the Surrey Netball U14 competition.
In Lacrosse we are the Trust 1st team champions and U15 champions,
Our second team are the Division 1 champions in the National Schools League
The 1st Team, U15, U14 and U12 teams are Surrey semi-finalists.
In teams, 12 girls have represented Surrey and 2 girls represented the South of England and we have 2 girls who have reached international standard….with 3 countries: Sabine van der Linden for England and Holland and Emily Irons with England.
In Tennis we are the Trust Tennis Champions, the U12 Surrey Champions, and the U12 Festival Champions.
In Rowing the Senior Squad were winners of the Thames Ditton, Hammersmith, Thames Valley park and Reading Amateur regattas.
We were the winners of the Hammersmith and Hampton Heads of the river races. In the National Sculling Head we achieved bronze medal positions and the J15 squad were winners of the Hammersmith regatta.
Lucy Edwards was ranked second in the GB trials and was awarded a bronze medal in the National Rowing Championships.There are also many individual successes in other sports.
So, our academic results are excellent, our Sport is storming, our Music exquisite.
It is all this success and more, in Art & Design and Drama, which has contributed to the decision of the GDST funding our new Sixth Form Centre and funding the school in its partnership with Roehampton University to manage the Sports Grounds at Dover House Road, a total investment of over £6 million, at a time of recession, and we are delighted that they have honoured us so.
All that we do here is supported magnificently by the parents, individually through supporting our girls and also collectively.
I thank FOPHS for their fundraising activities, £38,000 raised last year - which has amounted to a cumulative total of £200,000 over five years. A major funding this year was the refurbishment of the Drama Room to give us a lovely flexible space.
I thank all who contributed £69,000 to the Annual Fund to support projects in Art, the Library and Music. This year we focus on Sport, Science and Drama.
I thank the Old Girls’ Association for bringing people together from across the decades by running a wonderful Open Day and reunion in May, and a lovely 5 year reunion in November.
I do thank all the staff for supporting the girls in every way possible.
I also thank the parents and extended family for supporting the girls, and I hope the girls will thank you also!

Now I ask you to sit back and enjoy the evening as we congratulate the girls on their fantastic achievements.

Thank you very much.