From Founding Charter to Founding Families

This week’s blog comes to you fresh off a long-haul flight. I was in north London for Queen Elizabeth’s School Barnet’s 453rd Founder’s Day, including a beautiful service of music at St John the Baptist’s Church, the reading of the School Chronicle that has marked this day since 1573, followed by an outstanding Summer Fete organised by the Friends of Queen Elizabeths, the school’s parent organisation. At the service, surrounded by generations of QE families, old boys, and staff who have given decades of their lives to the school, I had the privilege, along with Dr Craig Cook the Principal of QE Gurugram, of being presented with a facsimile of the wax seal used to authenticate the original charter granted by Queen Elizabeth I. I have it on my desk in Dubai now, and we are looking forward to working on an appropriate way to display it prominently in our school.

It is easy to talk about heritage in the abstract, but my first visit at this time last year made it concrete. The people in that church were not there because they had to be. They were there because, across four and a half centuries, QE has become something that families return to, again and again: as pupils, as parents, as grandparents, as governors who stay involved decades after their own children have left. I flew home with a clear thought; that while we are focused on having a lovely setting for our school, the much more important building work is of our community.

That thought arrived at exactly the right moment, as next weekend we host our own community gathering: the Founding Families Kickstart. If Barnet’s Founder’s Day is the 453rd chapter of a long story, ours will be one of the opening paragraphs in our first chapter. There is something rather wonderful about the thought of standing in a room with the very first families to commit to QE Dubai, knowing that in years to come, people will look back on that gathering the way we now look back on 1573.

I am looking forward to watching the conversation turn naturally from logistics (uniforms, term dates, the practical business of joining a new school) to something more personal: parents talking to other parents, swapping notes, beginning to recognise each other by name. That is the real work of a Founding Families event – an opportunity for the first threads of a community starting to knit together.

A community is not only the people who join it; it is also the place that welcomes it in, and next weekend brings a reminder of that too. We will host an event for our wider Emirati community, with His Excellency Dr Abdullah Belhaif Al Nuaimi, former UAE Minister of Climate Change and Environment and Chairman of the Sharjah Consultative Council, joining us as guest of honour.

It matters to us, and to QE Dubai as an institution, that this is not a courtesy visit. We want to use the occasion to express our respect for Emirati culture and heritage, and our commitment to playing our part in the UAE’s national agenda for education: contributing confident, able and responsible young people into a nation that has always invested first and foremost in its people. Dr Al Nuaimi’s own career, spanning infrastructure, sustainability and education, is itself a reminder of what that kind of investment can produce over a generation.

Three communities, two weekends: the global QE family, gathered at Barnet for the 453rd time; our host community, the nation that has welcomed us in; and our own founding families, gathering for the very first time. It is about to get rather busy, in the best possible way.