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I want to give a welcome speech welcoming our new principal of our school. How can I do this and what can I say?

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Kathryn Amis Profile
Kathryn Amis answered

You’ve been asked to make a speech welcoming the new Principal of your school - what on earth are you going to say?

The secret to any speech (or anything for that matter!) is this...

‘To fail to prepare - is to prepare to fail”

What you need is information.  Gather all the knowledge you can about the principal’s background.

Where is he from?

Where did he go to school?

What qualifications did he get - degrees etc?

Where has he come from?

How long was he there?

Did anything significant happen (good things!) when he was there? Great results, student successes? Etc, etc.

Armed with this information you now make up a very short biography of this person.


And you begin your speech with...

“Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests, colleagues, and students.

It gives me enormous pleasure to welcome our new Principal, Mr John Smith to Newtown High this morning.

I thought it would be interesting to give you all just a very short ‘pen portrait’ of Mr Smith as he joins us."

(You could joke that it’s amazing what you detail you can find when you put John Smith into Google search!  And add - that you hope you have the right details for the right John Smith!)

Now you give your potted biography which you’ve prepared.

Depending on how much time you have and what talents you’ve got, you could go on to show some slides of what he can expect to find as he takes up his position.  Some suggestions.

  • Show a photgraph of all the staff
  • Show some great photos from last year’s sucesses at your school - the football team, a school trip, graduation.

A really nice thing to do would be to ask some students beforehand to write a ‘Welcome to our school” paragraph - this is very effective when you have young students coming up and reading them out.

The most important thing is to be warm and sincere, and I’m sure your new Principal will feel genuinely welcomed!


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