April-May 2021 | The Making of Us: Why School Matters

What are the challenges facing students and schools today? How do we encourage girls to become tomorrow’s leaders? What must change for students of all backgrounds to find ambition and succeed?

The Making of Us: Why School Matters (previously published as The Making of Her) is authored by Clarissa Farr, former High Mistress of St Paul’s Girls’ School in London, one of the UK’s leading secondary schools, and former President of the Girls’ Schools Association in the UK.

Farr’s commitment to the education of girls has led her to focus on the future of women in society and in the workplace: how we need to listen to our girls and what needs to change to enable women to make their full contribution to the modern world. In The Making of Us: Why School Matters, she uses the lens of her own education and career to take the reader through the arc of the school year, exploring questions of culture, community, and the role of school in a digital society.

Drawing on themes and questions arising out of The Making of Us, Farr will lead Beyond the Book participants in a wide-ranging discussion on the issues that are pressing and real for today’s teachers of Gen Z girls, especially in a world impacted by COVID-19:

  • Do girls learn differently?
  • How do we build confidence and resilience that will last?
  • What do today’s girls want from the world of work?
  • How do we look after well-being and mental health?
  • Compete or cooperate: what curriculum works and how will we measure it?
  • Building the future: what is special about the bricks and mortar school?
  • The school as community and the triangle of trust: parent, student, school
  • Why teach at all—and why go on doing it?
  • A game of snakes and ladders: the winding paths to leadership and headship
  • Managing career, family, and life—role modeling for our girls

These questions and more will be addressed in sessions which are informal, honest, and fun. Participants will be encouraged to reflect on their own real-time questions and will come away with ideas to support their teaching, work, and life.

Registration

This series of Beyond the Book with Clarissa Farr is comprised of four sessions from 2:00 – 3:15 p.m. EDT / 7:00 – 8:15 p.m. BST on the following dates:

  • Monday, April 12, 2021
  • Monday, April 19, 2021
  • Monday, April 26, 2021
  • Monday, May 3, 2021

REGISTER IS NOW CLOSED

About Clarissa Farr

Clarissa Farr is an internationally renowned speaker, writer, and consultant on leadership and effective education, as well as the mum of two Gen Z twenty-somethings, a keen reader of novels, runner, and cook. With more than twenty years experience at the top of the UK independent education sector, she’s coached and mentored educators and educational decision-makers throughout the UK and on four continents.

Farr’s career in education has spanned the UK public and private school sectors as well as international schools. Her non-executive career is equally wide-ranging: she served on the Board of the Royal Ballet School for eleven years and is currently a Fellow of Winchester College, which was founded in 1382 and is one of the oldest schools in England. She is also a Trustee of the African Gifted Foundation, which aims to give talented African girls a great start to careers in science. As a Trustee of the British Museum, she chairs the Friends Advisory Council, representing the museum’s 750,00 members around the world. Most of all, she enjoys listening to and encouraging young teachers—doing the job we all know is the best, sometimes the hardest, but also the most rewarding there is.

Praise for The Making of Us

“The book ought to be compulsory reading for all aspiring heads.”

—renowned UK school leader

“An urgent call to improve the way we help young women prepare for this complex world written by someone with oodles of experience and a load of passion for good education.”

—George Osborne, former Chancellor of the Exchequer and editor of the London Evening Standard

“Topical and moving … Clarissa Farr bridges the gap between a traditional education and the twenty-first century internet revolution.”

—Julie Lynn Evans, leading child psychotherapist and author of What About the Children?