Here at Channing it has been straight into the busy-ness of term: our first residential trip of 2026 has already taken place, with our Year 10 German students spending a week exploring Vienna under the auspices of the Austrian embassy. We’ve also had our first external speaker, with a fantastic lecture from historian Professor Tracy Borman on the Elizabethan Succession... – we are certainly kicking off the new year in style!

It’s quite the contrast to my first year as Headmistress here at Channing, when we started the Spring term of January 2021 in lockdown once again. My first assembly of term was delivered as a video, in which I talked about the difficulties of making New Year’s resolutions. They are by definition about attempting to turn over a new leaf, to make new starts. The problem is that new starts are not easy. Those of you who were reading Word from the Head back in January 2021 may remember both my failed attempt to complete Couch to 5K and – inspired by the genius of Bill Watterson in Calvin & Hobbes – why I think New Year’s resolutions are a bad idea (please see the image in this article).

A new start suggests that there is something to put right or to improve, some area in which we may have fallen short before. At first, we might have a lot of enthusiasm and be encouraged by small successes. However, as time goes on, we can forget to keep up our new endeavour so that, before we know it, we have given up. Indeed, research suggests that the vast majority of resolutions made at midnight on New Year’s Eve will have been broken by 13 January, which can lead to feelings of failure for having not managed to achieve whatever was desired. Then we beat ourselves up for being failures, which is even more counter-productive.

That’s not to denigrate making these resolutions, though. As I said back in 2021, the best thing about new starts is that there is no limit to the number of them you can have, so if you don’t manage to keep to your initial goal it doesn’t matter: we can get over it, and start again on something new. The most important thing is to forgive yourself if you slip, and have the resilience to try again.

This year, however, I suggested to the girls in [an] assembly that they might try something different. Instead of making a New Year’s resolution, why not carry on a positive habit from last year? Maybe we don’t need to reinvent ourselves every January. This insight came to me whilst listening to Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, co-founder of The School for Moral Ambition, giving the 2025 Reith Lectures. The Reith Lectures were inaugurated in 1948 by the BBC to mark the historic contribution made to public service broadcasting by Sir John (later Lord) Reith, the corporation’s first Director-General. John Reith maintained that broadcasting should be a public service which enriches the intellectual and cultural life of the nation. It is in this spirit that the BBC each year invites a leading figure to deliver a series of lectures to advance public understanding and debate about significant issues of contemporary interest.

Rutger Bregman gave a series of lectures entitled Moral Revolution, taking inspiration from American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead’s aphorism, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” In the second of his four talks, Bregman focused on how a small group of British men, led by William Wilberforce, started a movement which ended in the abolition of slavery. You may know that the Unitarians were also abolitionists, and William Ellery Channing himself wrote one of his most famous treatises, Slavery, in 1835. Thus this section really caught my attention:

The abolitionists were a small band of renegades, Quakers and evangelicals, who didn’t just take on the slave trade. They set out to spark a wider moral revolution. Wilberforce, for example, wouldn’t have described his life’s mission as fighting slavery. For him, abolitionism was a part of something bigger, the attempt to make goodness fashionable. 

But how do you bring about a cultural revolution like that? Their answer was simple, by practising what you preach, by pledging yourself to a worthy cause. Remember, people don’t do good things because they’re good people. They become good people by doing good things, even when they initially may act out of vanity. The latter is only human nature. We all crave recognition. Most of us want to be seen and admired. But in our society today, we admire the wrong things and the wrong people. What the British abolitionists taught me is that it is possible to rewrite a nation’s honour code, to make a different kind of ambition go viral, to make goodness contagious. 

I love the idea of ‘making goodness fashionable’. This was the core of my assembly message...: “Remember, people don’t do good things because they’re good people. They become good people by doing good things.” We can “make goodness contagious” – here at school, and in the wider world – by the way we behave. I encouraged the girls to think about how they might build on what they already know about how to be kind, and how to live the Channing Promise every day in 2026, rather than perhaps making a lofty new resolution that they might find harder to keep up.