Festival of Ideas is an annual occasion when, after our examinations, we ask our whole school community to unite their thinking around a theme in a cross-curricular manner with innovative input from our wonderful teaching staff and the help of an exciting programme of external speakers.

Following last year’s focus on Diversity, this year we will turn our attention to the theme of ‘Finding Your Voice.’

On Tuesday 7 and Wednesday 8 June students in Years 7 and 9 will be challenged in groups to research, write, practice and perform a presentation on our theme. This will help our students to focus on our Royal High Learner Habits, especially being brave, inquisitive and collaborative.

To help them do this we will welcome our first guest speaker of the season, successful young slam poet Megan Beech who is best known for her volume of poetry entitled 'When I Grow Up I Want to Be Mary Beard'.

Further to this our departments have worked on a series of exciting workshops on a wide variety of topics including dance, science, literature, sustainability and art which focus on our theme. The groups will work on their presentations on Wednesday morning and present them in houses in the afternoon.

The following week (13-17 June) we will be welcoming four lunch-time speakers to the school to further explore our theme from a variety of angles. On Monday we will be visited by alumna Abby Emery who has found her voice as a behavioural scientist working at the heart of government.

On Tuesday we will hear how Emma Ferguson found not only her voice but has become the voice of millions of young people around the world as Global Advocacy Lead on Child and Adolescent Mental Health for UNICEF. On Wednesday we will hear from exciting rising artist Manoel Akure and Friday will bring former Reuters journalist and author of The Dictator’s Wife, Freya Berry. We are hopeful that the quality and variety of our speakers, which are open to all, will challenge the girls to think about our theme in new ways.

We hope that the Festival of Ideas will be an enriching experience for our students, sparking their creativity and ambition.