10/09/2026
Tonight at our annual Prizegiving event to celebrate our outgoing Year 13, we were joined by alumna Nathalie Kenyon as guest of honour. Nathalie, pictured with Interim Head Jane Prescott and Director of Sixth Form Alice England, is Business Development Director at Sirius Medical, a specialist MedTech company. She welcomed the Class of 26 as future forces to be reckoned with and spoke of her career wins, wobbles and detours. Having left school with no fixed career plan, Nathalie sees life not as a straight line but as a winding road with her internal satnav system shouting ‘recalculating!’ along the way.
As a dyslexic, she confessed to finding school difficult and assumed life would also ‘feel hard’ but she learned that she had, in fact, built superpowers from her experiences at school and the resilience gained. Her listening skills, ability to find workarounds, to read people and not just pages meant she felt brave enough to embrace opportunities and use the detours along the way positively.
She told the Class of 26 to ‘try ALL the things’, to uncover their own potential, nurture it and be courageous. She reflected that you can find out more about yourself when things go sideways and that ’tough times don’t last but tough people do’ and to ‘fail fast and move on’. To fail she imparted, is just your First Attempt In Learning’!
Thank you Nathalie for sharing your journey and your kind words of wisdom. We can all learn from them. And to the Class of 26, as they go off to start their next steps, we wish you all the very best from everyone at Redmaids’ High.
