Headlining the speakers is Olympic gold and bronze medallist Crista Cullen, MBE, who achieved her success as a part of the Great Britain Hockey team. At 14 she was told by a coach she would never be good enough to make the England senior squad. This motivated Crista to practice hard to improve her technical skills – repeating 20,000 times in some cases the techniques she would need to make them a part of her natural game. “It was my responsibility as an individual to do it for me and the team.” After winning a bronze medal at the London Olympics Crista had already retired to focus on wildlife conservation issues in Kenya when recalled to GB squad with just 10 months to go before their Gold medal-winning Rio campaign.
Joining Crista on the conference topic of Embracing the Challenge will be a number of key independent and international school leaders including Chairman of the Independent Schools Council (ISC), Barnaby Lenon and David Woodgate, Chief Executive of the Independent Schools’ Bursars Association.
Our CEO, Barry Anns, and Ben Johnston will be joining delegates to the BSA Annual Conference for Deputy Heads and Heads of Boarding next week in Bristol. The conference topic is of interest to Engage as we understand intrinsically how each of our schools needs to take its own independent route to embrace the challenges they face in their own preferred way. That is the strength of the independent school sector, to ensure education delivery is highly tailored to pupils, students and other factors for any given part of the world. It makes our own challenge all the more fascinating, to create a fully integrated school MIS and finance system that shares a common code base and yet can be uniquely tailored in every location it is deployed. We look forward to chatting about how we do that and to learning more about developments in our school communities.