Welcome to our new website, and to the next chapter of The Mill
Welcome to the new Mill Trust website. As Chair of Trustees, I want to start by thanking everyone who has helped us get here: those whose drive and determination has made this happen, those who donated to fund its development, and our designer, who has captured the spirit of The Mill in a new logo and created a website we are genuinely proud of.
My own connection with The Mill began in 2010, sixteen years ago. But there are many whose ties go back much further: former pupils for whom time at The Mill was genuinely formative, and the parents, staff and governors who have shared in that experience and never lost their connection to the place, returning as volunteers and supporters long into their adult lives. That kind of commitment reflects something real about what The Mill provides for young people, and why it matters.
When I applied to be headteacher at William Ellis in 2010, the Mill was part of what drew me to the school. Here was a school with a genuine residential centre and a real commitment to using it. That mattered to me because my own educational vision has always been built on a simple conviction: that personal development is not a soft add-on to a young person's education but one of its most important outcomes. Not in a vague or woolly sense, but in the sense of real challenge, real experience, and the development of the independence, initiative and resilience that prepare young people for life beyond school and beyond exams. That development can come through music, sport and drama. But being out in nature, and collaborating with others to overcome challenges, personal and shared, is something quite particular. The Mill offers exactly that.
For me, what The Mill offers can be understood in a few different ways. There is challenge: the Duke of Edinburgh's Award, navigation, physical endeavour, the discovery that you are more capable than you thought. There is community: what happens when young people have to cook together, sleep under the same roof, look out for one another, and negotiate the small dramas of communal life away from home. These are skills that no exam can test and no lesson can fully teach. And there is simply being in nature. Living simply, without screens or schedules, in ten acres of Surrey Hills woodland, meadow, pond and stream, with the wider landscape on the doorstep. For many young people growing up in towns and cities, time in a place like this is a genuinely new experience, and an unexpectedly powerful one.
As we approach the Mill's centenary as a residential centre for young people, my commitment to what this place does has only deepened. This new website marks the beginning of a new chapter. We are launching a fundraising campaign to improve and develop the site, not to change what The Mill is, but to make sure it can go on being exactly that for the next hundred years. If you have a connection to The Mill, however distant, we would love to hear from you. And if you are coming to it for the first time, we hope this website gives you a sense of why so many people care about it so deeply, and why we are asking for your support.
Sam White, Chair of Trustees, The Mill Trust