Dean's Update | September 2021
I am so excited! We are back! And this time in person! Welcome Week is always such a high point, but the past 18 months have made the chance to meet people this year all the sweeter.
It has been a delight to have the chance of conversation with our new Y1 students and the excitement of staff as well as students was palpable, as we met in corridors and classrooms. Even with masks, the happy faces were shining.
There has been such a lot of preparation going on behind the scenes, for the return to campus, Welcome Week and new safe hybrid learning. The commitment of our whole School community has really shone through - from staff giving up weekends to set up and prepare materials, or working long hours over the summer to enable Canvas and other e-resources to open on time, to placement teams preparing new induction and setting up ‘Timetabler’, and students stepping up as mentors and carefully planning COVID safe events.
A special thanks to our Y5 placements and School team for everything they have been doing to enable an excellent start to the new Y5 curriculum, and superb preparedness of our future graduates for the roles ahead of them.
At last, our ‘new’ piano is also being played. I hope our LMSS alumni may pop in later to enjoy hearing how their pre-pandemic gift is now enhancing our togetherness.
Meantime, it is has certainly given me much pleasure to hear the music mix with the bustle of excited conversation, as I enjoy discovering that the coffee machine also does hot chocolate.
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And how blest are we to be a School with garden space and large patio doors into the Hub! We could never have imagined how precious having outside space would become. As I write this, the apples are being whipped off the tree near me by the wind, so we may need our jackets to enjoy the fountain outside over October, but it is wonderful to be able to have a coffee and chat without a mask outside.
With the empty building, COVID made for a bit of a ‘sad-demic’. However, while we might not quite have reached a ‘post-demic’ phase, as the sun shines on our vibrant campus, I am very much looking forward to the ways we can all make the most of the transition to ‘happy-demic’.