School portraits / QEH, Bristol, one sixth-form September to Easter
Six Top Tips From a Sixth-Former, Followed to the Letter
A girl who joined QEH’s sixth form from an all-girls school wrote six tips for settling in. I had just joined my fourth PTA, and I was desperate.
QEH in Bristol was a boys’ school up to Year 11, and the pupil who wrote up her first year in its sixth form, in July 2025, had come from Redmaids, which is all girls. She settled in faster than she expected. She never felt like a new girl, “even though technically I was”, and she left six Top Tips for whoever came next. I took them. I was forty-four and joining my fourth PTA, at a school where the other mothers had known each other since Reception.
Top Tip one: don’t worry if it all feels a bit much at first. My first meeting produced 61 WhatsApp messages about a tombola before I had found my car keys. I did not worry. I counted them.
Top Tip two: join something, even if you’re not fully confident. She joined the choir in her first few weeks and made friends straight away. I joined the PTA carol group, where nobody asks you anything because everyone is listening to the alto on their left. This is the genius of a choir. It is also how I stood next to a woman called Gwen for six weeks without learning that she was the chair.
Top Tip three: take House events seriously, and don’t worry about getting a bit silly. Her account of House Music is why I read the post twice: weeks of rehearsals, blue face paint, boys banging on tables, and then a boy in Year 13 who stood on a table and “gave a speech none of us will forget”. She does not say what was in the speech. I have thought about little else. The school’s report on the April 2025 finals adds that the winning ensemble’s lead singer learned the song that same day, because of illness in the band. Our PTA has a bake-off. I took it seriously. I entered three cakes under three names, and the lemon drizzle beat me.
Top Tip four: go to the trips and the random events. She went to watch the boys play in the football finals, among flags and drums, after Mr Heathcote let them take the afternoon off school. Nobody has ever let me take the afternoon off. I went to the dads’ five-a-side anyway and cheered for the wrong team for twenty minutes, because I had not yet worked out which husbands were whose.
Top Tip five, about free periods, did not apply. A mother of three has no free periods. She has a car.
The pioneers had it harder. Maddie Daw joined in 2017 in the first intake of girls, alongside 13 others, and became the school’s first female Captain of School. That had many highlights, she wrote later, but “having to wear bluecoats was NOT one of them!” Every pioneer has her bluecoat. Mine is a hi-vis tabard that says VOLUNTEER in letters you can read from the bypass.
Top Tip six: “Say yes more than you say no.” I did. By February I had said yes to the raffle, the minutes, the urn and a role whose title nobody could remember, which turned out to be treasurer. Gwen says I have settled in beautifully. I have written her a speech. I am looking for a table.
Sources
- QEH, My First Year at QEH Sixth Form
- QEH Bristol, Happy International Women’s Day
- QEH, House Music Finals
Notes from the School Gates is a light-hearted column: home scenes and family characters are invented; schools and public facts are real. About the column