Yesterday, as part of the World Book Day celebrations, I dressed as Professor Sybill Trelawney from the Harry Potter series. This was the perfect choice for me in many ways: it allowed me to wear a baggy dress and boots for the day (surprisingly enjoyable it itself) and to waft through the corridors undetected (also surprisingly enjoyable – had I released that the outfit made me completely unrecognisable, I would have planned the day differently). However, in other ways, this was not a fitting character for me: Sybill Trelawney is the Divination teacher at Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft, and is something of a Cassandra; she is the voice doom. I, on the other hand, see myself as the voice of optimism; I like to look on the bright side of life.
Dressing as Sybill Trelawney did provide me with the perfect segway when speaking to students in assembly yesterday about my decision to leave Brighton Girls at the end of 2025. As I clasped my makeshift crystal ball, I told students that I was making a leap of faith; that, while we can’t predict the future, we sometimes have to go for it, and grasp opportunities when they come along.
Sometimes outcomes surpass even our most optimistic predictions. Five years ago, we set ourselves the challenge of putting Brighton Girls back on the map for netball. We committed to increasing the number of fixtures, raising our profile, and asked ourselves the question: how long would it take for the underdogs (as we were at the time) to become the Best in Show? The answer: surprisingly quickly. This week, we have celebrated a string of successes in netball: on Tuesday, our U12 team were crowned SISNA champions – best in Sussex – and our U13s reached the semi-finals; last weekend, the U13s won the GDST netball tournament at Condover Hall; and these victories have come hot on heels of the U14s winning SISNA a few weeks ago. To have two year groups crowned County Champions in one season is remarkable and a testament to how far we have come in five years.
The sporting stories have continued today with Ms Plank coordinating our annual girls’ football tournament as part of our celebrations for International Women’s Day. “Made for the Game” is a national initiative designed to encourage more girls into football. Students from across the school joined in to learn more about this growing women’s sport. We have some talented footballers in the school and it was great to see them inspiring those new to the game.
Meanwhile, we hosted a very special event in school. To mark International Women’s day 2025, we decided to invite alumnae from the Class of 2000 back to Brighton Girls. Twenty-five years on, we wanted to see where their journeys had taken them. Five brilliant women, with five very different career paths, took to the stage to tell their stories: Lucinda Adams, senior broadcast reporter for the BBC; Jennie Lees, software engineering manager for Google DeepMind; Poppy Roe, actor and film producer; Imogen Wade, research analyst at RAND Europe; and our very own Lizzie Lyons, teacher at Brighton Girls Prep.
As school leavers in 2000, I wonder how many of them predicted where life would take them by 2025; and I wonder how many of the students listening were asking themselves where they will be twenty-five years from now.
