PUBLISHED 04 July 2024
Librarian, Amanda Culpan, leaves us at the end of the year, to embark on a long-held dream to renovate a homestead in Donegal, Ireland with her husband and our former colleague Dave who retired earlier this year. Amanda, a keen beekeeper, is looking forward to this next adventure and an opportunity to share her experience through a blog about their new lives.
Headmaster, David Harrow paid tribute to Amanda in his prize giving speech, thanking her for her “…service, support and enthusiasm for the whole endeavour, and for her cheerful advocacy for the joy and value of reading”, also thanking her for the instrumental role she has played in supporting the Year 7 Inquiry Learning projects alongside Assistant Head, Faye Marland. He went on to note, “In her interview for the role, she and I spent a lot of the time discussing what we might do to teach inquiry, and then we actually did it: her contribution here and the wider life of the school, has been instrumental in all that we do”.
Similarly, David thanked Dave for his “remarkable career in the school spanning comfortably over two decades. Dave’s status as a wizard, offering both the wisdom and the magic that goes with the word, is unquestionable. He enjoyed the daily thanks of colleagues for his work as timetabler and, overseeing the school’s cover lesson system; he led the analysis and tracking of student performance, wielding spreadsheets and statistics with joyous aplomb. Perhaps most significant was his work in the time of COVID: I still recall the meeting where we agreed that we needed to move our curriculum fully online in a flash and, as is typical of Dave, he simply cracked on with the logistics, the training and the moral support and made it all work”.
We send our heartfelt thanks to Dave and Amanda for all that they have brought to our community, both directly within their roles and through their positivity, enthusiasm, kindness and good humour.