Last Saturday was one of the highlights of the annual calendar: our Magnolia Tea and Tours day for alumnae. We welcome generations of former students back to school. They explore the building and share memories. They get that rarest of privileges – a glimpse inside the staff room – and to poke around the Head’s Study and share their memories of terror at being summoned to it, even if for the most benign of reasons. And they get a really superb afternoon tea to top it all off.

This year, Liz Harrison as Chair of Governors asked me to speak to alumnae at the tea about my own time in their school, and what I will take from it. There were so many examples I could have given of Abbey experiences that I will always treasure. Many of them are those highlight moments: the musicals, the national tournament victories, the exhibitions and talks. Our London ARCH event on women in advocacy, featuring some of the country’s best legal speakers, among whom Abbey students did not just hold their own – they shone, and spoke with an authenticity and conviction that captivated everyone in the room.

However, the two examples that came to me as I stood in front of that remarkable Abbey alumnae audience, all of them out in the world doing such wonderful and varied and powerful things, were not red-letter experiences or notable triumphs. They could not have been more everyday, nor more Abbey.

The first one was walking to lunch and passing a small group of students. Two were clutching swords and wearing paraphernalia – was it Roman? Medieval? I can’t even remember. They were about to do battle. A small audience looked on approvingly.

The second was walking back from lunch on a different day. Three students this time. One in the middle, wearing a paper hat. The others on either side, holding a tennis ball. The game was pretty simple: knock off the hat, William Tell style.

These scenes, and many others like them, are everyday experiences at The Abbey. We take them for granted. But in how many schools do 13, 14, 15 year-old girls feel free to be this playful, this silly, this unabashedly themselves? To laugh at life and with each other, to mess around with friends, to be simply and joyfully and exuberantly who they are?

We all know the challenges facing young people today, and we especially recognise our responsibility as a school to support young people through them. Our school’s goal – to achieve academic excellence with joy – reflects not the simplicity of pursuing joy, but the complexity of it – it is a worthwhile goal, because it is not always easy to achieve.

But if we can help students to excel, while being absolutely and confidently free to be themselves, and to retain, their whole lives long, the spirit of playfulness and fun inherent in both of those experiences, and obvious in the laughter ringing around the afternoon tea, we will have done something that matters. And those things: the excellence, the freedom, the playfulness, are some of what I will take with me, and cherish for the rest of my life.

Will le Fleming, Head