Hello everyone! We are your new head girl team, and we wanted to start a blog to keep everyone updated with what we are up to. In this first post we wanted to discuss our aims and values for the year ahead.

1. Increasing the awareness of Mental Health in the School

Although Notting Hill does a great job in advocating for mental health, our recent mental health week being just one example, we all believe that there is always more that we can do. We identified further raising awareness and reducing the stigma around mental health to be a key aim for us as a head girl team.

We feel like the values that we stand for as a school, such as connectivity and respect, mean that it is crucial we make mental health a talked about topic, so watch this space!!

2. Integrating years

As a Head Girl Team we value the relationships built between girls of different year groups and think this contributes hugely to the community that we all know and love at NHEHS. We want to allow more girls from different years to get to know each other in a social setting. To do this, we thought of internal sports tournaments with mixed year group teams competing together. This would be a fun and engaging way to get girls to work with girls that they may not have spoken to before.

3. Creating and reintroducing events

A huge part about NHEHS are all the creative and unique events. In previous years, the Head Girl Team have done an amazing job at bringing new and inventive events, and we definitely want to keep this going. We have so many fun festivities at Christmas Time, from the Christmas Assembly to the Boar’s Head Carol, and one of our main aims is to introduce some new events throughout the year. The Talent Show was a great way for everyone to showcase their talents as well as appreciating other people’s gifts. We would love to make this an annual event and have even more people participating next year! As well as the Talent Show, we have many new ideas for events to introduce (and re-introduce) to school.

4. Allowing girls to push back boundaries

Pushing boundaries means thinking outside the box, and doing things which seem impossible. Having been inspired by Daria in year 7 and her Swimathon, we realised the importance of allowing all girls, regardless of their age, to be able to bring about change. To make this accessible for everyone, we would like to implement the initiative of an ideas box, allowing anyone, from all years, to suggest ideas they’d like to see happening in school. This will be crucial to allowing everyone’s voices to be heard, so keep an eye out for it!

We would love to have the chance to introduce ourselves to you all properly, making sure you are comfortable approaching us whenever you have a spontaneous new idea or even just need some advice. As mentioned, soon to come in the Portrait Room will be a suggestions box for you all to put any of your ideas in, ranging from eco policies to new events. There will be an option for you to keep this anonymous, or for you to write your name and form so we can contact you about progress or to brainstorm more ideas. We will also have a noticeboard above this box to introduce ourselves and will constantly update this with new events and our favourite suggestion for each half term. Lastly, make sure to check out our Firefly page as we will keep you updated with exciting events news on there, including the summer suggestions from our assembly!

Have a great summer and we can’t wait to start working closely with you all next year!

Immi, Dedan, Anna, Emily, Dhruti & Jojo