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Principal's Blog

Radnor House parents receive a Weekly Bulletin of news information, highlights of achievements and details of forthcoming events, as well as additional communications from other departments and individuals as necessary.

Our Principal, Darryl Wideman, also writes a regular blog to share his thoughts about education and the world with a wider audience, which you can read below.

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  • Smarter Than The Average Bear

    Most of you will be far too young to remember the Hanna-Barbera cartoon character of Yogi Bear, one of whose catchphrases is the title of this week’s blog.  Yogi was often able to get himself out of tricky situations by deploying a mixture of cunning, deceit and quick thinking, summing hi...
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  • What Have I Learned Recently?

    The short answer to the title of this blog would be, ‘Lots, because that’s what happens in life’, but this week’s offering is not meant as an exercise in too much deep reflection.  Rather, it was the title I used for my latest cycle of assemblies this week, sharing with...
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  • We Need To Do Things Differently

    One of the best books I have read recently is called ‘Head, Hand, Heart’ by David Goodhart.  If ever there was a timely analysis of what has gone wrong in this country in the last seventy years and why we find ourselves in such a mess, this book delivers.  Whether anything will...
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  • The Time of Your Life

    I was looking through my various folders of notes to try to bring something different to the end of term assemblies before Christmas when I came across a list that I could not remember using before.  The upside of being the Head of two different schools is that you can recycle material you used...
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  • Another Eclectic Journey

    In the weekly bulletin that went out on the final day of last term, I highlighted something that I had read in Tim Harford’s ‘The Next Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy’, which is in effect the things from number fifty-one to one hundred that helped to develop the world as...
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  • Don't Mention the War

    There was talk a while back about banning episodes of Fawlty Towers because there was a risk that some people might find them offensive.  This feels to me like another example of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but I suppose it is symptomatic of the times in which we live.  Given that...
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  • It Probably Isn’t Coming Home – Part Two

    Last week, my rambling journey of World Cup recollections took me to the semi-final defeat to West Germany in 1990, and this week will bring us up to date as we await Sunday’s match last sixteen match with Senegal.  Success there will probably set up a quarter-final match with France, whi...
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  • It Probably Isn’t Coming Home – Part One

    Last Friday, two boys from Year 11 left school a few moments apart, so one of them was already waiting outside when his friend came out to meet him.  When they saw each other, they both raised their arms in the universal gesture of triumphal celebration.  Don’t get me wrong, I am alw...
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  • Sixty-Three Years in a Supermarket

    Conscious that we all might need a break from my growing obsession with authors who debunk the myths that we think we know about what happened in the past, I thought this might be a good time to go off on a different tangent and reflect on one of the books I read over the summer that reminded me tha...
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  • We Will Remember Them

    We have focused our attention this week on the annual Act of Remembrance through a series of assemblies for all the children.  Sally and Quentin, our Heads of School, also joined me at the war memorial in Radnor Gardens at 11 o’clock today to lay a wreath on behalf of the school to pay ou...
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  • The Dangers of Nationalism

    Nationalism is the sort of word that provokes a full range of responses, from exuberant enthusiasm to deep negativity.  It is also a word that can be manipulated in a myriad ways to suit the purposes of politicians, historians and commentators from Moscow and Kyiv to Edinburgh and London...
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  • The Not So Dark Ages

    It has been a strange half term from my perspective, with time away from school inspecting, the death of Queen Elizabeth and then a bout of Covid all making it harder than usual to drop into the normal rhythms of the year.  I am sure I came up with a plan at some point in the proceedings to dev...
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