Jasper See

One of the best tips I received going into Year 12 was ‘be sure you use all the resources available like past papers, exemplars, and practice questions to develop the skills and practice for exams and assignments’. 

Juggling everything in your final year can sometimes feel difficult but this advice really helped me. So did spending time with my teachers one on one to make sure I had gained a solid understanding of all the content.  

It was also important to me to balance my commitments by maintaining perspective and trying to be as effective as possible with the time I had available to me. I am hoping to do a degree in Law or Commerce/Finance so I think these skills will help. 

There were probably more than a hundred things that I learned in my first six months at Newington, one of which was not learning to tie a Windsor knot. But what really defined those early months wasn’t the academic side at all – it was the small, slightly messy moments where you just had to figure things out yourself.

I strongly believe that true growth demands vulnerability and failure. Vulnerability is not a weakness; it is a prerequisite for progress. Our challenges are the very things that define us. If you were to erase your mistakes, you would be erasing yourself. It takes courage to admit you were wrong, courage to try again after falling, and courage to be seen as imperfect. Embracing this cycle is where resilience and the Black and White army has been forged and where we build the character and the grit required to thrive in the messy, unpredictable world.

As we celebrate those around us who have transgressed the ordinary boundaries of citizenship or academic prowess, award winner or not, you’ll come to learn that each student has experienced their own version of a tangled (Windsor) knot.

Because the truth is, none of us succeeds purely on talent or genius alone. And while we recognise these incredible achievements, let’s also acknowledge that success is not a story of perfection; it’s a story of trying again – sometimes reluctantly, sometimes after frustration, but always because someone else believed they could.

Achievement, however, is only one snapshot of who you are – not the whole picture. Your defining moments may arrive later, differently, or quietly. What matters is that you keep showing up, keep supporting others, and keep leaning into the imperfect process of becoming who you’re meant to be because when you look down at the crest that we all wear today, you’ll notice that the Wyvern may avoid falling by staying on the ground – but it was born with wings for a reason. So, keep taking leaps. You might fall for a moment, but that’s how flight begins.

*a precis from Jasper’s speech at Annual Prize Giving 2025