Principal’s Prizegiving Address 2024
Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you for joining us on this special occasion.
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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 Principal, 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.
Suggested Reading – Part Two
Next week’s final blog will be the transcript of my address from our annual prizegiving ceremony, so this week I will round off the second part of my compilation of writers and books that I have found interesting over the last few years. Although I had written a few magazine articles and...Read More
Suggested Reading – Part One
It was always the plan to round off my blogging career at the school with some reminders of the best books I have read over the last few years and some of the ideas that have resonated most with me. I also received a nice email a couple of weeks ago from a parent of one of our Upper Sixth leav...Read More
Think Again
This will be the last individual book review that I will write for the weekly blog because I am planning a couple of suggested reading overviews in the next two weeks and the final blog at the end of term will, as usual, be the transcript of my prizegiving speech. It therefore seems appropriat...Read More
And Finally on Finance
Conscious that there will only be a few more blogs before the end of term, I will take the chance this week to wrap up some final thoughts from three books that I have reviewed recently, all of which have focused on the economy in one way or another. As the election campaign rolls on (or shoul...Read More
Follow The Money
You may not immediately be able to place Paul Johnson, the Director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, but you would know him if you saw him, which would usually be on the news commenting on government economic policy. He is clearly an intelligent man with a very good grasp of how it all works...Read More
Other Versions Are Available
A second visit to the thoughts of veteran US politician Bernie Sanders is needed this week to round up some more of his ideas. Not for the first time, I was reminded of the line from Enoch Powell’s biography of Joseph Chamberlain when he said: ‘All political lives, unless they are cut of...Read More
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Money
A few weeks ago, I highlighted Jason Hickel’s book ‘Less Is More’, which argues that our obsession with capitalist growth is doing untold damage to our planet in the pursuit of economic prosperity for the few at the expense – and potential annihilation – of the rest of...Read More
A Final Farewell to Arms?
This year’s trip with our Year 9 pupils to the battlefields of the First World War was probably as straightforward as any of the twenty or so I have been on over the years. The journeys back and forth passed without incident, the customs checks took no longer than might reasonably be exp...Read More
Twenty-One Years in the Charente
Way back in 2003, in what was either the most inspired or the most foolish thing we have ever done, our family flew to France in the February half-term break and bought a house. This was not quite the random act it may appear, because we knew when we set off on our journey that a property purc...Read More
London Calling
The compiler of the first English dictionary, Samuel Johnson, once said, ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.’ The London of 1777, when he made this remark, must indeed have been a place of great interest, but also no...Read More
Money Makes the World Go Round
If, like me, you have subscribed to Private Eye magazine over several years, your view of the world almost inevitably takes on a similar slant to those who write and edit the articles. It is called confirmation bias, and it happens to all of us. It was the same reason my parents chose to...Read More