We have a simple mission at The Abbey: to change and develop our students’ lives for the better, and to change the world. Rather – to help them change it.

Part of that change is gender equity. We celebrate whole-heartedly the progress that has been made – but there is of course so much road remaining on this journey. A dispiriting example: if you take a random group of men and women, in that group, men tend to give more respect to other men; and women tend to give more respect – also to men.

Plenty of psychological studies continue to explore this phenomenon. In experiments where a mixed group is given new information, they are all – men and women – six times more likely to respond positively if the information comes from a man. Both male and female scientists rate the same CV more positively if it has a man’s name at the top. Parents estimate the IQ of their sons at 115 and their daughters at 107. Boys rate their own IQ at 110 and girls rate theirs at 105.

And this behaviour is so clearly learned, and learned in plain sight. Ask five-year-olds who they know that’s smart. They’ll give you a mixed answer. Ask six-year-olds, and both boys and girls will tell you it is the boys. Because they see and hear apparent evidence that this is the case.

What we do as a society over and over again, and more or less from birth, is to praise boys for their natural ability and exuberance and girls for their effort and amenability. This stuff lands. Boys tend to develop a confidence that all will work out ok; girls that they need to try hard to succeed. In another experiment, teenage boys and girls were given 16 maths concepts and asked to rate their confidence in using them. The trick was that three of the techniques were fictitious. In all countries girls are likely to be honest and self-critical and boys are likely to rate their confidence pretty high in the use of the techniques – whether or not they actually exist.

So part of our mission is to help girls avoid this incessant conditioning and live life on their own terms. Sometimes prospective parents ask if single-sex schools really prepare girls for the real world. The simplest answer is: and then some! They don’t just prepare girls for the real world: they turbo-charge them to thrive in it. The article in today’s edition of Gateway about Kiran’s Alumna Talk provides a very clear example.

But there is another side to this sense of mission. If you can support young people to see when things aren’t right, and have the confidence to lead change in one area, then they can do this in every area. There’s a famous Shaw quotation: “the reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

The quotation comes from Shaw’s play Man and Superman. In both the quotation and the title of the play the word ‘man’ is fairly unmissable. As for women – well, the text suggests they did have a role to play in social change: but it was to marry and give birth to the right sort of man.

We have a different kind of social and personal change in view: one that depends, perhaps, on the unreasonable person and the change that together, such people, with an unreasonable hope and expectation for better, can bring about in the world. To help make it a world of increasing freedom to be and do whatever fulfils you; a world built on communal support and generosity that underpins fairness for all. That’s the world we work towards every day at The Abbey.

As the school term comes to a close, we see so many examples of what people can do when they come whole-heartedly together. We see students on stages and in orchestras, on catwalks and in classes, on pitches and in courts, being nothing more than themselves – and to inspirational effect. As the last notes of an exhilarating term settle, here is to that shared inspiration, and all it can bring in the New Year. And here is to rest, peace and joy wherever it may be found over the holidays. We’ll see you next year!

Will le Fleming, Head