6th February 2012

How do you feel when you fail something? And how do you pick yourself up from failure and try again? What lessons can we all learn from failure?

Such questions will be at the centre of ‘Failure Week’, which is running the week commencing 6th February at Wimbledon High School GDST. Whilst the initiative may sound unusual for a top performing girls’ independent school, the idea is to demystify the word and encourage the girls to put ‘failure’ into context and to face it head on and learn from it – hence calling it what it is and not dressing it up.
Spanning the Junior and Senior Schools, involving students from four to 18, Failure Week includes:

• Assemblies focussing on the subject of failure, with examples of successful people, including famous names and teachers, who have ‘failed’ along the way
• Activities designed to assess how students feel about failure
• Tutors disccussing the merits of failure, sharing a 'failure' they faced in their lives with their pupils and discussing how they came through it.
• Explorations of the negative side of 'not failing'; the importance of having a go and risking failure
• Emphasis on the pastoral network of support that underpins school life and can help when things go wrong
• Encouraging parents to discuss any 'failures' they have had with their daughters and what they learnt from them

The Headmistress of Wimbledon High, Heather Hanbury, came to teaching after a successful career in Management Consultancy and is adamant that success and satisfaction in life can come from ‘daring to fail and daring to get it wrong’:

“My message to girls is that it is better to lead a life replete with disappointment than one where you constantly wonder ‘if only.....’. The examples I use include: ‘If only I'd tried out for the first team, I might have been selected’ or ‘If only I'd applied for that job, I might have been successful’. I want to suggest to girls that it is acceptable and completely normal not to succeed at times in life.

“‘Failure Week’ complements what we do throughout the school, which is to encourage our girls to be courageous and to take calculated risks. We give our students plenty of support and opportunities to try new things in and outside the classroom. For high-achieving girls especially, where the fear of failure can be crippling, this intellectual resilience and robustness is vitally important. Successful people learn from failure, pick themselves up and move on. Something going wrong may even have been the best thing that could have happened to them in the long run – in sparking creativity, for instance – even if it felt like a disaster at the time.”

Wimbledon High is part of the GDST (Girls’ Day School Trust) network of 24 schools and two academies across the UK. Chief Executive, Helen Fraser, is adamant that the initiative will be invaluable for the girls.

“Resilience is so important in working life nowadays” says Helen. “Things happen that are not ‘fair’ – companies merge, economies crash, strategies change – and a young employee can find his or her career hits the wall, through no fault of their own.

“Wimbledon High School are helping to build vital resilience in girls; by showing how making mistakes is not necessarily a bad thing, that it is fine to try and fail – and then pick yourself up and try again – or as Samuel Beckett said, ‘fail better’. 

“Any successful woman or man will be able to look back at bad times in their career and remember how they regrouped, and moved on to better things.”

Wimbledon High School www.wimbledonhigh.gdst.net is an independent girls’ school in South West London, with over 900 pupils aged from four to 18.

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