Launch

“Glory lies in the attempt to reach one's goal and not in reaching it” – Mahatma Ghandi

In my school pupils in their third year complete a ‘Year 9 Award’.  This is a recent initiative introduced to plug the gap between Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4: it ensures that a year which, since the abolition of the SATs exams, would otherwise be somewhat vacuous, still produces something constructive.

Part of the Award is an Independent Project.  Undertaken over the course of the whole year, the project encourages pupils to choose a particular area of interest and to stretch themselves, with the ultimate goal of completing a piece of work of which they can be genuinely proud.  This neatly parallels my own challenge.

And so, this year, I will be offering support and guidance to these pupils, using my own challenge as a model that they can follow.  While my travails will not change the world, I hope that my example might encourage and inspire some of the pupils to achieve beyond what they would otherwise have dreamed possible.

I launched my project in a talk to the yeargroup.  I spoke about my skiing accident, recovery and Ironman.  I introduced the Arch to Arc.  Finally I explained that I was not in any way confident of completing it.  But therein lay the challenge: for true success, I said, lies not in outcomes but in effort.