Headteacher's Blog #3

As I come to the end of my third week at LSA, I have found myself overwhelmed by the support of staff, students and the local community. The young people at LSA are the politest I have met in my career. This is a community that cherishes and nurtures a core British value: good manners. This really is a defining characteristic of the school and the community, and having grown up south of Watford I appreciate it fully. Communication on the tube trains and buses of London was usually a grunt or a tut, and if you smiled at people, you feared that pepper spray was only seconds from hitting your eyes.

One of the contradictions of modern Britain is that the politeness and gentility of our good manners are often starkly at odds with the reactive crudity of our online communication. I admit to being a social media Luddite, probably the last of a generation of people who wrote emails, letters and memos. I am well used to being the target of online debate (and indeed abuse) and I am largely impervious to it, being old and offline; young people, however, are not. What we, as adults, post, we model, and what we model becomes culture. If our online communications matched the good manners of our Northern hospitality, then the world could only be a better place.

The Online Safety Bill came into law nearly two years ago now, with the aim to protect children from the devastating impact of uncensored access to the internet's darkest recesses. Whatever the debates on free speech, it is up to us, as the adults in the room, to support our young people to be safe, remain safe and try to enjoy childhood. I remain proud, as ever, to be at LSA.