Message from the Head of School

Story appeared in the 2021 issue of QMS Connections Magazine.

BY DAVID ROBERTSON, Head of School

“Looking Back, Looking Forward.”

The first month of the year gets its name from the Roman god, Janus, who reputedly had two heads, one to look back on the year just passed and one to look ahead to the future. Right now, at QMS, it feels as if that’s what we are doing. We’ve already started honouring the marvellous endeavours of our Founders and extolled their admirable characters, but we are obviously very conscious that the ultimate tribute that we can pay to them is to create a school of which they would be immensely proud in this, its second century.

Stewarding a school is similar to nurturing a garden. We are engaged in tending, growing and encouraging blossoming all around us, but we also have to apply what I call ‘selective weeding’ as we examine our traditions and approaches and as we adapt to our times. That approach helps us to preserve the best of the past and embrace the best of the future. Our Founders set such strong foundations through all the trials and tribulations of the first fifty-two years that they ran the School and so much of their influence is still very much around. They are referred to and quoted frequently in the school of the present.

Turning 100 in a pandemic has been a true test of will and I remain very proud of our whole community for the way that we have responded. Placing even more emphasis on our basic values and highlighting their importance more than ever have been very conscious strategies that have helped us all navigate the troubled waters as well as we have. The constant questions in challenging times are: “What are the opportunities?” “How can we turn this situation into a positive?” and “What will we do differently?” Of course, I would like to think that this approach is ideally suited to this period in the School’s history. If an organization does not adapt in some way to the times then it can quickly become an anachronism or a bubble, and we’ve had quite enough of “bubbles!”

Miss Denny and Miss Geoghegan wanted to produce young people of sound character, with a strong sense of service, who would contribute positively to society, and those desires are just as strong today as they were 100 years ago. The good news is that despite the misgivings that we all have about some aspects of our modern lives, we see all around us at QMS, girls and boys, young people, more committed than ever to their larger responsibilities and to our collective desires to see a better, more just and caring world. When you have the joy of being around them every day as I do, you cannot help but feel better and more hopeful, so I’m so looking forward to those times when we can have people back on campus sharing in the atmosphere and sensing the feelings that I am talking about. Those moments of re-connection which are on the horizon now and inching ever nearer, will be the completion of that sense of looking back and looking forward, blending reminiscences and hopes. The Founders created “a thing of beauty” and “a thing of beauty, is a joy forever.”