End of Lent Term Address 2025

April 2, 2025

Well done to everyone for getting through to the end of another busy Norwich School term. With all that we have heard in the last two presentation assemblies, two of our key aims for pupils, breadth and leadership & service, have certainly been in evidence. However, as we come to a holiday and a chance to change pace, I want to return to the third of our pupil aims. It is the theme I raised at the start of term, curiosity, whether practical, intellectual or creative.


I am sure you can all remember exactly what I talked about; indeed, you have been thinking of little else since January, but just in case there are a few hazy memories, I mentioned curiosity in connection with some extraordinary natural phenomena such as the East Atlantic Flyway, the Connectome of a female fruit fly and the difference in scale between a million and a billion.


You may be thinking that I must be scraping the barrel if I am repeating a theme for an address, but the reason for returning to it is that our ability to intersect with a concept such as curiosity is different in term-time from a holiday. The key to that difference is choice: during term, we obviously hope you will be curious but you have to do so largely on the school’s terms regarding compliance with our timetable, following syllabus constraints and keeping up with homework tasks. However, for the next three weeks or so, you set the pace, you get to follow your ideas and interests with less outside interference.


For our public examination candidates in U5 and U6 who are likely to be planning for a holiday which blends rest and revision, the difference between term and holiday might be at risk of becoming blurred. However, I encourage you to keep this word and quality in your minds, even if it requires a bit of a Jedi mind-trick to start with. You are more likely to retain information or a concept if you are excited about it and clear on why you are learning it, how it is going to help you or how it fits with other learning. Try to be curious about the ideas, texts or techniques you are mastering as it will help them to stick.


If this really is all too much and you see the upcoming revision process simply as a grind-to-get-through, at least make sure to insert curiosity into your break-periods. If you think of the 5 ways to wellbeing that Norwich School promotes (give, connect, stay active, keep learning, take notice), curiosity could be said to be in all of them, especially if one draws in practical, creative or intellectual flavours, but it certainly cuts into the last three; the last one, take notice, is essentially curiosity via another phrase.


Whether you will be revising this holiday or not, I encourage you to feed your curiosity and offer some stimuli for consideration, based on personal experiences this term. I hope you have had or soon will have experiences which get you thinking. See which of the following areas interests you most:


  • From a Royal Geographical Society talk on Rewilding and in Mountain Guru, a biography of Doug Scott, one of Britain’s greatest climbers with a claim to fame being the highest bivouac ever when he spent the night 100 metres below the summit of Everest without oxygen or sleeping bags during his pioneering ascent of its south-west face: what does wild mean in terms of man’s relationship with nature? Can humans be involved in a place which is truly wild and, if so, how?


  • From our own Senior Play, The Watsons: what is the relationship between an audience and its actors, between writers and the characters they create, between history and the present? This play’s metatheatricality challenges the suspension of disbelief that lies at the heart of story-telling and performance art.


  • From an agri-tech day at John Innes Centre, put on at the Food & Farming Discovery Trust, with a visit to Food Enterprise Zone, how are we going to feed the planet in the 21st century? What are the ethics and finances under consideration at the world-leading research centre in our city?


  • From A Complete Unknown, the biopic film about Bob Dylan starring Timothee Chalomet, where does creative originality come from and how do cultural norms change over time? Credited as one of the most influential artists of all time, Dylan’s music and lyrics upended divisions between folk and rock with tunes that became emblematic of anti-war movements and counter-culture in the 1960s. Chalomet’s gamble in the taking on of singing and playing Dylan classics is striking, too.


  • And, finally, from Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, how do you tell stories without words? Most famous for its male chorus of swans (think of the final scene from Billy Elliot), Tchaikowsky’s iconic score is brought to life by the humour and attention to detail of Bourne’s choreography and, most of all, the raw athleticism of its dancers.


I wanted to complement this last reference by showing off some of our male and female dancers from the wonderful recent Senior Dance Festival, but that has not proved possible because of injury, so stand by for something from them next term. Instead, I have asked Lana Kiddell to reprise her outstanding rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow from Jazz Night. I hope this gives you an opportunity to reflect on areas where you will give rein to your curiosity during the upcoming holiday.


In terms of curiosity, what I am advocating for is a desire to find out more, to follow your interests to explore more about the world around you and yourselves. If you can establish this attitude as a habit, I believe it stays with you for the rest of life: it might be characterised as being not childish as we grow up but remaining child-like.


To illustrate the point, I finish today by referencing the passing of Peter Grover MBE, the legendary Scout leader of the 8th Norwich whose memorial service took place in the Chapel on Saturday. The following comes from a poem of tribute from one of his fellow-Scout leaders (and, for information, Robert Baden-Powell was the founder of the Scouting Movement). The quote is as follows:


Baden-Powell said adult leaders needed to be Boy-men.

“A boy can see fun and adventure in a dirty-duck-puddle.

If you are a boy-man, you can see it too”.

Peter was a boy-man.


The quote above is gendered as a product of its time but I suggest that the concept now applies equally to girl-woman. I like the way this last quote shows the close intersection of curiosity with fun and humour, in some ways the sillier the better. Child-like, not childish.


Have a great holiday and I look forward to seeing you all after Easter.


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“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” (Matthew 6:25-27) There’s a saying that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Years ago I met someone who doesn’t like that saying very much. That’s because his job is to design book covers. I watched him lead a really interesting seminar where he showed us some of his designs. He explained how his artwork was trying to sum up – on just one piece of laminated, folded paper - the message and themes of all the other pages in the book. Just occasionally, some book covers do this by choosing a key phrase from the book and putting it in large letters on the front. A famous example is Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, where some editions had a cover that read: ‘Big Brother is Watching You’. If you know the story then you’ll recognise that as the sinister propaganda message that no-one can get away from. Some copies of the Lord of the Rings had printed on the front ‘One ring to rule them all’. And The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams had just two words on the cover of some editions – ‘DON’T PANIC’. It begins to make sense when you discover that some of the characters in the story are using a space travel guide (the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) which is designed to help you through any difficult situation. And what makes the guide so successful and popular is that its first principle is on the front cover. Whatever happens – DON’T PANIC. Have a look at the cover of your hymn book for a moment. What do you think? We’ve gone for a pretty classic look. The name of our school in gold embossed lettering, and the school crest complete with a motto in Latin for a classy finish. Sometimes I wonder – entirely hypothetically – how we might redesign the cover. If you were going to put a few words on the front, one essential message that everyone in the school was going to see at the beginning of every day, what would it be? Here are a few suggestions I got from people around the school, some more serious than others: · “Show Love” · “Shine Bright!” · “Treat others as you would like to be treated” · “Do some work in your study periods” · “Wake Up!” Actually, I think the words ‘DON’T PANIC’ might work here too. I hope you’re realising, now that we’re a few weeks into term, that panicking is never worth it – and if you’re tempted to panic then sharing your problem and talking to someone almost always helps. Maybe that would be good to remember at the start of the school day. This also reminds me of one of my favourite passages from the Bible, the words of Jesus we heard just now: “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? … Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”  I’ve had times myself where those words from the Sermon on the Mount have given me some perspective. Perhaps part of that passage would work well on the front of our hymn books – that wouldn’t be a bad thing to keep remembering. We’re not about to reissue the school hymn books with a new cover any time soon. But there’s nothing stopping you imagining a message on the front of the hymn book – whatever you need that message to be. “Don’t panic.” “Do not worry.” “Show love.” Why not have a few helpful words in your mind’s eye every time you pick up these blue books in the morning?
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By Eleanor Lewis September 11, 2025
Norwich School has an established tradition of working with partner organisations to host high-quality lectures on our site. We are particularly proud of our links with the prestigious Norfolk Cambridge Society, whose long-running series of 23 lectures has been amazing. The 24 th public lecture took place in the Blake Studio on 11 September 2025 in front of a capacity audience comprising school pupils, parents, staff, alumni, and interested members of the city’s intelligentsia. It was of particular interest to the Norwich School community that the speaker was one of our own: Old Norvicensian Professor Charles Forsdick , Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge and Lead Fellow for Languages at the British Academy. He has published widely on travel writing, colonial history and literature, penal culture and slavery, all reflective of his lifelong humanitarianism. His topic was “The Role of Language Skills in Building a Better World“ in which he discussed the growing importance of language skills in an increasingly complex and dangerous world. Charles is well known as an academic of great insight and erudition, combined with natural talent as a brilliant communicator, a lively sense of humour and a profound social conscience. His love of languages has firm roots in the teaching he received at Norwich School. Indeed, his hometown of East Dereham featured prominently in his talk, and his links to the school and to Norfolk remain strong, Following his talk and over refreshments a lively debate continued, discussing a wide variety of thorny issues brought up in his talk. These included the short-sightedness of monolingualism, the value of languages to improving vaccine take-up during the pandemic, our woeful language proficiency versus our European neighbours and challenges with current grade boundaries in language A Levels. It was a pleasure welcoming the Norfolk Cambridge Society and an illustrious speaker of such calibre on site for such a compelling event. We greatly look forward to next term’s lecture to take place on 5 February 2025: How AI Works and How it will Transform our Lives given by Neil Lawrence , DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge, Senior AI Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute and Visiting Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Sheffield. Booking is now open, and tickets are selling fast. See this link: Lecture: How AI Works and How it will Transform our Lives – Norfolk Cambridge Society . - Jonathan Pearson, Development Director ( jpearson@norwich-school.org.uk )
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