Abingdonian 2017

3 www.abingdon.org.uk I am delighted to be able to provide a foreword for this latest edition of The Abingdonian . It has given me a chance to reflect on my first year as Headmaster of Abingdon, a year which seemed to fly by, packed with adventure and incident. It is also an opportunity for me to express my thanks to everyone in the Abingdon community for the warm welcome that they gave me and my family when we arrived in September 2016. There is a palpable and precious sense of community here and in my first year I particularly relished those occasions when the entire school was engaged in an activity together. The charity walk - or ‘Charathon’ - came early in my first term and I enjoyed the chance to get to know the local countryside better while also chatting to pupils and colleagues as we covered the 13 miles together. Little did I know at that point that my first term would culminate in a role in the staff panto; a hair-raising, surreal and ultimately enjoyable experience! I quickly picked up on the sense of ambition and the standards of excellence which underpin life at Abingdon. The pages of this magazine capture this but the sheer quality that was on display in so many areas on so many occasions was hugely exciting for me to see. Be it in academic life or in the Other Half, there was so much to enjoy and each day offered something new and interesting. In the first year as Head of a school like Abingdon, there is an enormous amount to take in and I leant heavily on the support of the Senior Leadership Team and of course particularly on the encyclopaedic knowledge of Abingdon that Mr Dawswell brings. I was fortunate to work with two outstanding Heads of School in the form of George Jeffreys and Jonah Walker who were superb representatives of what the School is all about. Of course my principal goal in my first year as Headmaster was to reflect on what I saw and to agree a future direction for the School. Surveys and informal feedback played a key role in this process and I hope that we now have a Development Plan in place that will set the course for the next five years and enable us to make a great school even better. I would certainly like to take this opportunity to thank Mr Jenkins and the editorial team for all the work that they have put in to produce this latest edition of The Abingdonian . I hope you will relish it as a record of the past twelve months as much as I will. Michael Windsor Head’s Foreword