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Head's Blog

Radnor House parents receive a Weekly Bulletin of news information, highlights of achievements and details of forthcoming events, as well as additional communications from other departments and individuals as necessary.

Our Head, Darryl Wideman, also writes a regular blog to share his thoughts about education and the world with a wider audience, which you can read below.

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  • Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

    I thought a change of direction might be needed this week, steering away from further comment about the relentlessly miserable news, the end of summer and the unshakeable image of John Laurie’s Private Frazer saying, ‘We’re doomed, Captain Mainwaring, doome...
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  • The Man in the Ironed Mask

    In follow-up to some of the comments from Dr Phil Hammond in Private Eye that I highlighted last week, it seems appropriate amid the ongoing confusion about key messages to give some thought to masks and their recent ubiquity, despite being told for months that they were not necessary and...
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  • How Mixed Are Your Messages?

    One of the better books I read over the summer was Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense, which I will return to in more detail in a later blog or two.  For now, I will just pick up a couple of his ideas, with a...
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  • So Many Ways to Begin

    A new school year begins, with all its exciting possibilities and opportunities.  There are lots of new pupils in the school, and new parents as well of course.  There are remarkably few new staff for once at Radnor House, which I suppose is hardly a...
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  • Head's Address - Prize Giving 2020

    The scientist Marie Curie once said: ‘Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.  Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.’  If that is not the perfect summary of recent events, I don’t know what is. 
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  • The Faintest Ink

    In our household, we often talk about having our own mantras.  I can never quite decide what mine would be.  ‘It’s not rocket science’ is probably the phrase I use most often, but since I know nothing about how to propel a projectile into space, I am not really very well...
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  • Divided We Stand?

    There may not be as many laugh out loud moments as usual at the moment, but I had one inadvertently on Sunday morning when I was flicking through the BBC news website, where they show a copy of the front pages of the main national newspapers each day.  The Mail on Sunday is about the last paper...
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  • Looking Forward At Last

    There was another step along the road towards a more normal existence this week, when I was able to have the first discussion in months with my senior colleagues about our strategic planning for the future.  Almost everything we have done since March has been short-term, wit...
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  • A Different Kind of Risk Assessment

    In the latest edition of the newsletter that is circulated to the leaders of schools in the Dukes Education group, Aatif Hassan highlighted a fitting analogy about where we find ourselves at the moment, likening the situation in response to Covid-19 as being one where we hav...
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  • Everything is Out of Date Now

    I recently watched Charlie Brooker’s ‘Anti-Viral Wipe’, which was the usual mix of harsh criticism and biting satire, mostly illustrated through the clips he showed of some of the absurdly overconfident statements politicians were making back in February an...
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  • The Rise of the Introvert

    As I mentioned in my letter to parents earlier this week about our plans to reopen the school building after half term, there has been some interesting feedback in the last couple of weeks about how some of the children who are usually the quieter ones in school have been able to thrive during the p...
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  • Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

    It seems like an appropriate time to roll out the quotation that there are three types of falsehood: lies, damned lies and statistics.  A quick look at Wikipedia reminds me that the attribution for this much-used remark is obscure – not Disraeli nor Mark Twain, and probably not attributab...
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