Mr Nicholds' Reflections

Coming from a commercial background, as I do, it’s all too easy to dismiss hope as some sort of passive emotion that doesn’t really achieve anything. After all, if you want something to happen, you need to do something, make some changes or take some action that will produce the results you’re looking for. Simply hoping that something good is going to happen is no guarantee that it will.

But hope is really important to us all, as is its close ‘relation’ belief. Together, they are a quiet force in our lives that provides essential motivation and encouragement that things can be better, even when we’re facing really difficult times. When something hasn’t gone right in our lives, hope gives us a reason to try again tomorrow - it is what gets us up in the morning.

Hope is what keeps people alive when survival makes no logical sense: prisoners who endured concentration camps, as Chaplain Katie noted in her reflections last week, patients who keep fighting an illness, or communities that rebuild after everything is taken from them – which we unfortunately see too often in the increasingly troubled world that we live in.

Having hope, believing things can be better, believing in ourselves, keeping a positive mental attitude, and of course, working hard at things is really important in a school sense also.

Kent College is all about unlocking potential, with our teachers and the whole KC team focused on helping students to achieve the very best that they can - providing the support and encouragement that they need as individuals, developing their resilience and giving them confidence to go out into the world and really make their mark.

This is very much what we, as a team of Governors, hope for our student body. It is what motivates us and provides us with a focus in working with the school leadership team and our wonderful KC staff to build a better Kent College for tomorrow.

Jeremy Nicholds, Chair of Governors