Welcome to a refreshed layout of The Annals. As I take my leave from Ardingly after twelve absorbing and rewarding years at the helm, I hope you will allow me to look back not just on the year just gone, but also on my time at the College, and what I hope we have achieved together during it.

First, for those of you who like numbers, the ones that stand out to me are on pupil participation - over 500 students have performed on a Drama or Dance stage this year, 490 music lessons are happening each week, and over 1,000 students have represented the College at sport this year across 970 fixtures.

The ever-increasing academic accomplishments of Ardinians also deserves special mention. To be the top ranked UK boarding school for the IB Diploma this year was the pinnacle of quarter of a century of embedding the IB at Ardingly. Many excellent schools have tried to do this, and it has taken a rare combination of qualities among our teachers and students to achieve it. One of these qualities may escape the casual observer, but has been at the very heart of what has been achieved in the last decade, and that is the College’s adaptability.

To paraphrase Lampedusa, for some things to remain the same, everything must change. I have taken this aphorism as an imperative that schools must adapt to stay relevant in periods of accelerating change. Set against this are the words of many alumni returning to the College, declaring that “it feels like I left yesterday and it has hardly changed at all”. So, has it changed, or hasn’t it?

While the architecture of the College, its terrace, corridors and many Houses are instantly recognisable, a child entering the school today experiences it very differently from his or her predecessor even a decade ago. This is so primarily thanks to teachers who see their purpose not just as purveyors of subject knowledge but also as agents of social responsibility and relevance. How can young children form a coherent understanding of their world? Our prep school’s response was to re-imagine their curriculum, recognised earlier this year by The Week magazine naming them as the UK’s Most Innovative Prep School. How can teenagers test themselves in real-world environments? Cue students pitching themselves (literally) into a stunning range of over 500 Enterprise activities and winning their own awards. This is the achievement of our World Ready approach to education, which I hope will be an enduring legacy, even if the logo or the caption changes!

As a lifelong proponent of the freedom for parents to choose how their children are educated and of independent schools to meet those needs, I take great pride in the fact that – despite the headwinds facing our sector – we are managing to buck the national trend by continuing to grow, with the Ardingly Family of Schools now educating over 1,300 pupils in Sussex. This is 400 more pupils than when I joined in 2014, and reaffirms the growing and positive impact of the College for education locally. With the addition of schools in Kazakhstan, Vietnam and another shortly-to-be announced, Ardingly’s reach and reputation continues to grow abroad too.

Whether your perspective is local or international, the College continues to evolve, both changing and keeping the essence of itself the same.