As you are no doubt aware, leadership plays a central role in life at St Andrew’s Prep School. As our vision states, we are aiming to prepare confident, compassionate and self-disciplined individuals who live and lead with integrity. As a school we endeavour to meet this aim in a number of ways.

 
We are now officially a Leader in Me School. The Leader in Me is a leadership process that all pupils are following, based on Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The pupils have been given direct teaching on all of the 7 Habits this year, through tutor sessions and chapel assemblies. They are encouraged to apply the 7 Habits to their lives here at the School and beyond.
 
The 7 Habits are:

• Be proactive
• Begin with the end in mind
• Put first things first
• Think win-win
• Seek first to understand, then to be understood
• Synergise
• Sharpen the saw

 
In addition to getting this training through direct teaching, the pupils are also experiencing the 7 Habits being taught in other subjects. They are learning how each habit can relate to a lot of different areas, such as Habit 3 – put first things first, helping pupils to organise their time effectively, and Habit 6 – Synergise, helping pupils to work effectively in teams.
 
Pupils are also exposed to a range of other leadership opportunities in their varied activities. For example within uniformed organisations, pupils are split into patrols, with each patrol of about 8 pupils having a leader and assistant leader. They are also learning that leadership isn’t about positions and titles, but about attitudes and behaviour.
 
In this busy season for sport, with the IAPS cross country championships this coming VISO weekend, together with many netball and rugby fixtures and tournaments, Habit 6, Synergise, seems particularly important. Stephen Covey describes this habit as follows:
 
“Synergy is what happens when one plus one equals ten, or a hundred, or even a thousand! It’s about the passion, the energy, the ingenuity, the excitement of creating a new reality that is far better than the old reality.”
 
We are all looking forward to seeing leadership lived out on a daily basis by all of our pupils in various ways, both big and small, during the rest of this term.
 
Mr Steve Foster
Director of Co-Curricular