Good Leadership

High school is a great time to seize opportunities where an individual can take a leader stance. Our current head girl had to undergo a series of ruthless tasks before being able to claim her position, in order for us to trust that she would be capable in becoming the student voice for the entire school. To facilitate the schools requirements she first had to create a profile in which she had to assess her strengths and weaknesses as a leader and discuss why she would be the best candidate for this position. Subsequently, as she progressed to the second round, she was given fifteen minutes to produce a five minute presentation on why the paperclip is a useless object, and this was presented in front of our entire year and the sixth form teachers. Evidently this was a challenging task in itself and shows how she was able to use her time wisely so that her presentation was concise and had a certain level of humour and gave us a good sense of relation with her. 

Her personality is such that she is much more directed to the ‘south’ methods of leadership, meaning that she is very open to taking aboard other people’s suggestions yet she does not comply with the common weakness of this type that is not being able to say no to others. She is able to be decisive and sure of her own ideas yet easily cooperates with others, whilst making sure she believes in whatever the end solution or plan is. As an individual she is very approachable and open, and this enables us to voice any of our own ideas that we might have through her, and to go to her with suggestions where she can then provide us with an overarching decision.

One of the main ethical dilemmas she faced was whether or not to tell a teacher about a girl who came to her and told her about her eating disorder. Normally teachers recommend that they're informed however the girl specifically asked that this information was kept only within the knowledge of the students. The head girl decided to keep this information private in order to respect the wishes of the girl, which allowed us all to further trust her as a head girl.