Celebrating a school's anniversary – how Newton Prep is marking 25 years

Alison Fleming, headmistress of Newton Prep in London, explains how the school is celebrating its 25 birthday...

Looking at how schools celebrate their anniversaries can be a little daunting, as we found when we were designing our Newton@25 programme of events. We cannot possibly compete with the long, illustrious histories of the big public schools when anniversaries become a huge affair, often linked with a major fund raising project. And yet we were very committed to acknowledging and celebrating this important milestone in the life of our school.

Newton Prep was founded in 1991. We decided that this 25th anniversary was an opportunity to showcase the present and to introduce the next 25 years of the school’s life, rather than attaching some very sentimental importance to the birthday itself. For this we have had to harness the energies and engagement of the whole Newton community – parents past and present, current pupils and alumni, staff from throughout the 25 years into the present day and reach into the burgeoning community springing up around us as the new developments of the Battersea Power Station and Nine Elms developments take shape.

So we are celebrating our 25th birthday in a typically unique Newton way, not just with one splashy pompous black-tie-silver-jubilee-dinner (which is not very ‘us’) but by threading activities, initiatives and events throughout the year and across the curriculum. Not trumpeting loudly and flashing our non-existent school crest and motto at every opportunity, but by weaving Newton@25 into the already vivid tapestry of the school year: for example, by including a Whole School Sponsored Walk (see picture) into our charity schedule, but this time with the magic number 25: walking 2.5kms for the little ones, or 25kms for our older pupils and fitter staff, and, hey presto, £25,000 was raised, to be divided 25% apiece for our four chosen charities. Or by launching the Newton Challenge as part of our aim of creating a legacy of social responsibility and community for the next 25 years: our smaller children have volunteered to complete 25 tasks throughout the year: from emptying the dishwasher at home to picking up a piece of litter in the park; our older children are going a little further, devoting 25 hours across the year to helping in a local charity or initiative.

But don’t worry, the children are having plenty of fun too as they celebrate the life of their school. As we saw when we celebrated the Queen’s 90th birthday last summer, Newton Prep children know how to party! So on the very first day of the new year, we tucked into the school’s largest ever cake and sang a rousing Happy Birthday to Us with a mix of old staff and new arrivals, new tiny children and old pupils now grown-up. In November, we staged a Music Festival and launched our Silver Symphony Appeal to stage a gala performance of a specially commissioned short piece of music from an up-and-coming composer later in the year. In April, we will have a Dress Like 1991 Day, when we will hark back to the news stories of 1991, play Nineties music and learn typical 1990s topics. It isn’t quite the Tudor grammar lessons that Shakespeare’s old school in Stratford are now providing each day to visiting tourists, as part of their 400th birthday celebrations, but we’re doing our bit to create a sense of the school’s beginnings back when it had 70 pupils and 7 staff, compared to the 655 pupils and 120+ staff it has today! Finally, in July 2017, we will dovetail with the annual PTA Summer Fair, to provide a Big Night Out for all Newton families, called the Newton Silver Splash, where we will lay on live music, staff cabaret, karaoke, dancing and world food stalls for a proper party for all ages.

One traditional thread of celebrating a school’s birthday is to use it as an excuse to fundraise. Anniversaries often go hand-in-hand with the launch of some appeal. But we have been adamant from the start that this was never going to be our agenda: what we are doing is using the birthday as an excuse for forming an alumni programme in the first place, but with no hint of begging hand outstretched. So we have been quietly sifting through contact details and letters from old boys and girls, and put together an Alumni Christmas Drinks at the beginning of the Christmas Fair in December. Imagine our surprise when two of the original intake from 1991, now in their thirties, turned up…. Married to each other. What greater testament to Newton’s enduring magic!

In the end, it is my sincere hope that by the close of the summer term of 2017, each child and every parent will feel that they have contributed personally to this milestone in the school’s life. We should do no more trumpeting than that – as the London Magazine commented in 2011, when it reported that Newton had celebrated its 20th anniversary, “to be honest, it’s so much a part of the London school elite that it feels as if it’s been around forever”.

For more information on Newton Prep, see the school's profile on School Search, the leading online guide to UK independent schools.