Miss Bertha Lucy Kennett was Headmistress from 1909-1926 and subsequent Headmistress, Miss Scott writes of her that she was “by scholarship, teaching and administrative ability, and by personality, pre-eminently well qualified to lead the school at this point in its history. She was a mathematician at Girton, the equivalent of a Senior Optime in the Mathematical Tripos in 1892 (Cambridge degrees, even titular, not being awarded to women until nearly half a century later), and had taught for one year at Liverpool College for Girls and then for nearly five years at Nottingham Girls High School before being appointed headmistress of Ipswich High School in April 1899. Her most urgent task now was to raise the general level of work in the school to the more exacting standards than had previously been aimed at by any except the outstanding pupils, and in this she was remarkably successful in a remarkably short time…..She was a brilliant teacher, an indefatigable worker….Miss Kennett’s universal courtesy and her generosity in giving credit and even precedence to others, notice from the outset, were disarming, and her own personality and her influence came to be more and more clearly felt.”