On March 15th some of our students travelled to Harrow School to take part in a symposium for the two schools.

By Zoe M,  Year 12

Having left school at the beginning of lunch in a horde of Addison Lee’s, as one does, we arrived at what we all thought was Hogwarts about half an hour later. The school is both massive and beautiful; walking through to the hall in which we met our teams, we were passing enough impressive statues and portraits to almost need reassurance we had ended up at the right place and not a museum.

Once we met our teams, the biggest of which (team English) was six people, we were assured that we were where we were meant to be, and we all had a welcoming speech from Ms Copin which honestly could have been congratulations for finding the room as being selected for the project. Then, to get to know one another better, we had a few icebreaker questions, the most entertaining of which was a prompt to find what all group members have in common: the more trivial, the better. My team began by making the relatively obvious link that we all study English… However, we then had a heartwarming conversation about the literature of our childhood and realised we had all read and all loved, of course, The Gruffalo and that we were all quite emotionally attached to The Simpsons.

Then came the time to focus on the often multifaceted and challenging questions we had been asked. All teams’ questions had the theme of gender somewhere within them; the English team, for example, were asked about gender and nature within Shakespeare plays and ecocriticism: a relatively new school of literary criticism which examines the presentation of nature and sees its environmental consequences in the world around us today. We were assigned subject expert mentors, some of whom were NHEHS and some Harrow teachers, who were all invariably kind, supportive, and helpful.

After this short burst of intense concentration, we had a delightful tour of the school from the boys in our group, one of whom took me to see Lord Byron’s grave; the poet had attended the school between 1801 and 1805 and his grave was in a peaceful, beautiful spot by the chapel with a view over lots of London. After we returned from the tour, we all went for dinner in an Italian restaurant called Grove on the Hill which was delicious. We weren’t sitting with our groups so we could meet more people and, to help us with this, the teachers had printed out one sheet between two of more icebreaker questions and a quiz that was curiously very rabbit themed. We then went back to school in our trusty Addison Lee’s, with a lot to talk about after a great evening.

Thank you to all the teachers from Harrow and NHEHS for supporting us – Ms Copin, Miss Aherne, Mr Rodgers-Endersby, Miss McHenry and Mr Livings.