Lecture Series in Full Swing

The Upper Sixth Form Lecture programme for Michaelmas 2010 has already hosted its first two speakers. Building on the Lower Sixth Civics programme, in which pupils elect to take a variety of courses focusing on the world beyond A levels and Repton, the U6 lectures regularly bring students in their final year of schooling into contact with notable men and women who have in one way or another made their mark upon the adult world, and have interesting stories to tell about it.

David Loyn, the award-winning BBC foreign correspondent, falls squarely into that category. David initiated this year’s programme by delivering the inaugural Roddy Scott Memorial Lecture (Roddy was an OR and journalist killed tragically in 2002 in the Chechen conflict), sharing fascinating insights into his work in some of the most dangerous theatres of conflict on the planet, including Iraq, Bosnia and Afghanistan.

Just as compelling, and at times harrowing, is the life story of Holocaust survivor Freddie Knoller. The Nazi era is widely studied in British schools, but Freddie’s extraordinary recollections injected the raw immediacy of personal experience in a way that no history lesson in a classroom could ever hope to. Separation from his parents at seventeen (he never saw them again), arrest by the Gestapo, involvement with the Resistance, and incarceration at Auschwitz are just some of the staging-posts in Freddie’s remarkable journey, chronicled fully in his book “Desperate Journey”. 

Six more lectures are scheduled between now and Christmas, on subjects ranging from automotive retailing and cookery to round-the-world cycling and ice dogs in Mongolia.

This Friday, 24th September, we welcome Perween Warsi, OR parent and highly successful local businesswoman, to speak about her career as founder of S&A Foods (supplying chilled and frozen dishes to supermarkets), and to elaborate on the proposition “Life is a journey, not a destination”. For Sixth Formers on the cusp of commencing their own personal journeys beyond Repton, it should be interesting listening.