Young people aren’t ‘snowflakes’, insists private school head

YOUNG people are not “snowflakes”, they are “remarkable” and have faced more challenges than any peacetime generation, according to a leading private school head.

Sally-anne Huang, who has just taken over as the first female High Master of St Paul’s School in London, will address the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference today, and will say that what young people have gone through this year is “turning them into a remarkable and powerful generation”.

Ms Huang will also say that rather than being perceived as an “ivory tower”, independent schools should be a “life raft” for liberal education and the development of sport and the arts.

“Anyone who, like me, was with 18-year-olds in March when they suddenly learnt that not just their chance to prove themselves in exams, but also all those joyous rites of passage at the end of their school days had been taken from them – anyone who saw them pick themselves up, move on, adapt, they would not call them snowflakes,” she will tell the virtual conference. She will say there is a need to “deliver a curriculum that suits their needs, and continue to question what’s going on in our exam system and in our universities”.