It has been a busy week for off-site activities and trips! Our Juniors, as ever, have been out and about. On Thursday, our Year 5 and 6 juniors travelled to Broughton Manor Prep, another school in the Chatsworth family, to compete in a football festival with many other boys and girls. Today, all of our Juniors were on Wimbledon Common for some cross-country running.

Our Year 11 Geographers have spent the past two days at Juniper Hall, studying rivers on location. There is really no substitute for studying the world in ‘actual reality’.

Our Year 7s and 8s visited Wimbledon Theatre on Wednesday afternoon.

In the next couple of weeks, Year 8s will be enjoying a History field trip to the Royal Docks at Portsmouth, our Year 5s will be visiting an Historic Royal Palace, and our Year 6s will be spending a day at the British Museum.

I heard A. C. Grayling speak at Wellington a few years back, a contemporary philosophy I much admire. On the subject of education, he said learning is not just about the acquisition of knowledge, it is concerning the acquisition of understanding. I genuinely believe that understanding is more readily accessed via the experiential learning offered by these field trips and visits than from reading textbooks alone and hoping to memorise and repeat what you have read. Besides, these trips are fun, and I’m happy with that.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend.