Dear OW,

Letters often open with the writer hoping that the reader and reader’s family are all well, and it can read as idle rhetoric. If that is the case, then recent times have changed things: I sincerely hope that you and yours and all your friends have been and are well at this disturbing time. I also hope that your finances are intact. You might be interested in a match report about your old school Wrekin and how it is coping in covid times.

It was in the last week of the Lent Term, nearly three months ago that Lockdown was announced, and pupils went home. Our overseas’ boarders in many cases got the last flight leaving the UK back to their homeland. Only a very few children of key workers came and went and since Easter the gates have literally been shut. Our School Archivist (a man very many of you will know), Mervyn Joyner, confirms that Wrekin has never before been shut for a term in its history. 

Despite the physical world of Wrekin having the eerie presence of the Marie Celeste, in the virtual world, the school has been very active indeed. All our lessons have run as normal online for every pupil, and this normal timetable has been supplemented by assemblies, exercise sessions and an array of activities like online debating, yoga and art classes that have given our pupils purpose and a proper shape to an ongoing and good education. You might have heard that such provision has been wanting in the state sector, but I was surprised to hear on ‘Channel 4 News’ that only 25% of independent schools were offering such a diet. I hope you are pleased to hear that your old place was in that best quarter and pleased to hear that we have had so many letters expressing support and praise from our parental body for what we have put in place. OWs of a more elderly vintage will be ‘mind-boggled’ by the notion of a virtual school where classes happen online. I empathise with them, but feel proud that I have leapt from being just about able to turn the computer on to now talking with the School in Assembly by way of a 21^st Century Google Meet.

Behind the scenes, a tremendous amount of work has been going on to get pupils back into the real school, and in the week beginning 15^th June, our Year 10 (or first year ‘O’ level pupils if you prefer old money) started to make their way back in small groups, taking small steps towards what we very much hope will be normal service to be resumed shortly. Currently, the taped areas and the signs on the floors and walls make the place look like a crime scene under investigation. Perhaps some of you felt like that when your Housemaster entered your dorm…

You might be interested to hear (and even half expect) that 60% of all employees at Wrekin have been furloughed and that we have introduced discount on fees for this term given the inevitable impairment to provision: not much cricket, for example, has been played (as the lovely sun shone ironically day after day in May). Financially, Wrekin has taken a hit as you will surely have inferred, but we are robustly in possession of assets as well as strong will, and there is no doubt at all that we will end up on the vincere side of the scale (rather than the other one).

Term ends on Saturday, 4^th July and, yes, you’ve guessed it: Speech Day will be online. You can get 100,000 people onto a Google Meet platform, you know, so we will be inviting the whole of Shropshire. I hope to meet you at an OW do and soon: what a tonic it will be to get together for a gin after all this. Perhaps I’ll see you at the House of Lords for the dinner. This event sold out in about ten minutes, and for those of us who work at and rejoice in Wrekin today it is immensely heartening to  hear what in high regard the place is held. 

Tim Firth, May ‘20