Issue 11 • July 2016

What’s happening at BCHS with Crosshill
Keep Your Head Up and Think Positive
At Blackburn Central High School we believe that
every child deserves a champion, an adult who will
never give up on them, who understands the power
of connection and insists that they become the
best that they can possibly be. To me, teachers are
a compass that activates the magnets of curiosity,
knowledge, and wisdom within their students.
Our Year 11 students, who worked extremely hard
preparing for and in their GCSE examinations, have
recently left BCHS for the final time; so I’d like to
use this opportunity to offer them some additional
advice, which could also be useful to the rest of the
extended BCHS with Crosshill community.
The decision to change and grow is a powerful tool that can help you move forward, but you need to make a
conscious choice to develop yourself. It’s easy to feel aimless when you’re not working towards a concrete
goal, so narrow in on what you’d like to accomplish in the near future. What do you want to achieve? There
is no “perfect” answer, but you can find an answer through trial and error.
Now that you have something to aim for, brainstorm for ways to get yourself to where you want to be. Look
to people who have already done what you’d like to do, and follow their example or ask them for advice.
You are more than capable enough to achieve whatever you want to achieve, but you might forget that when
you hit an obstacle. A success list, a collection of your accomplishments, can help to remind you why you
shouldn’t let go of your confidence. Record all accomplishments, regardless of size, in a book or on a blog.
When you start to doubt yourself look at all of the positive things you’ve done to remind yourself that you
can accomplish your goals. Large accomplishments are really just a collection of small accomplishments.
Don’t ever think that your accomplishments are too small to be proud of.
Set your own benchmarks, some people progress faster than others. Life is not a sprint; it’s a marathon,
focus on what you can do to improve yourself instead of comparing yourself to other people. Keep growing,
setting goals, and moving forward, one step at a time, and you will continually impress yourself. It doesn’t
matter how slowly we go. What matters is that we keep going.
As Jean-Luc Picard expressed: “Things
are only impossible until they’re not.
Seize the time… live now; make now
always the most precious time. Now
will never come again. Inside you is the
potential to make yourself better, and
that is what it is to be human. To make
yourself more than you are. Make it so!”
Mrs Atkinson
Headteacher
2