Today we were delighted to welcome back Old Girl Allegra Benitah née Kurer (Class of 2004) to present Lower 6 students with their GCSE certificates.
Allegra comes from a family of Haberdashers after her mother, the broadcaster Vanessa Feltz (Class of 1979) attended the Girls’ and her uncles the Boys’ Schools. Having joined the school in 1991 in Red Prep she went on to be in Alpha forms throughout the Senior School before going to read Languages at Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Allegra spoke of her many memories of school life in what was her first visit to Habs since receiving her A Level certificates back in 2004 – winning a giant cake on St Catherine’s Day and the worst snow day ever which included a near four hour coach journey to Stanmore Underground Station. Allegra spoke of the inspirational teachers that defined her time at Habs including her A Level English teacher – the current Senior Deputy Head Mr James-Robbins. She said of her Sixth Form studies that ‘teachers aimed to treat the students as adults, encouraging them to express and share their own ideas and opinions wherever possible’.
At Cambridge Allegra made an early decision to change from Languages to Law, a potentially traumatic experience at the time but a change of path that lead to success as a Tax Lawyer in the City. More recently she is proud to have made the choice to pause her legal career to become a full-time mother to her two young children, a choice that she feels she has had to defend too often but did so passionately, invoking the education that she received at Haberdashers’ as empowering her to make the right decisions for her and her family at the right time in her life.
After a rainy day family cooking activity led to the posting of her different and innovative designs for Challah bread online, Allegra now manages a successful career as a media personality on a variety of television programmes, including Saturday Morning with James Martin. Indeed, she hotfooted it to Habs this morning having appeared first on ITV’s Good Morning, Britiain!
Allegra challenged our students to think about how they were going to use the ‘wonderful gift of a Habs education’ to forge their own path in life and emphasised that it doesn’t matter if that plan changes at any point. She said that Habs had given her, and all of them, ‘the confidence, sensitivity, wisdom, clarity of thought and empathy, to make a success of their lives’ in whatever way they might choose.
