From the Principal
Dear Blue Mountains Grammar School Families,
Much to Celebrate
Over recent weeks, I have had the opportunity to enjoy the work, talent and commitment of our students, and the work of our staff. I want to take some time to thank them for it.
The Whole School Music Concert was a terrific evening and another reminder of the pleasure of performing. Our students appeared to take real joy in making music together. Thank you to every student who prepared, rehearsed and performed, and who gave the adults in the room such an entertaining and uplifting evening. I am also grateful to our staff, whose work behind the scenes made the occasion possible, and to the families who continue to support our young musicians.
This week, I also ventured into the city to see our Junior School students perform at the Independent Primary School Heads of Australia (IPSHA) Performing Arts Festival at Sydney Town Hall. It was a magnificent setting and a memorable experience for our students. I was enormously proud of the way they performed and represented the School. Once again, they demonstrated that BMGS punches well above its weight.
My thanks go to the students for their commitment and to the staff who prepared, accompanied and cared for them throughout a very long day. I returned home grateful to God for the richness of our community and for the students, staff and families who contribute so generously to its life.
We have also recently gathered for our Hockey and Netball presentation evenings, with our Football presentation still to come next week. These occasions are more than just the distribution of awards. They are genuine community events and an opportunity to celebrate what it means to play sport for BMGS. Thank you to the coaches, managers, staff and families who have supported our teams throughout the winter season.
I also want to acknowledge our Year 12 students for the mature and purposeful way they approached their Trial HSC examinations. These examinations represent a demanding point in their final year, and our students largely met the challenge with focus and determination. As they enter their final three weeks of formal schooling, I wish them well and encourage them to remain present to this important season. There is still work to be done, but there are also friendships, traditions and moments together that deserve to be noticed and enjoyed.
There has also been considerable success in academic and problem-solving competitions. Both of our Stage 2 classes won their respective categories in the Mathematical Association of NSW competition. To have our Year 3 and Year 4 teams judged the best in the State is an exceptional achievement. It is particularly pleasing that this is the second consecutive year that Stage 2 at Springwood has won its category. I congratulate the students and thank the staff who encouraged their curiosity, mathematical thinking and capacity to communicate their ideas. I also congratulate Mrs Spohr and Mr Culbert for creating a place for learning that means so much for our students.
Our Tournament of Minds students have also represented BMGS with distinction. Two teams won their regional finals in the Social Sciences and The Arts disciplines and will now compete at the NSW State Final at UNSW. Our Year 8 and 9 team, TOMians Against the Machines, also received an Honours award for its response to the STEM challenge.
Tournament of Minds asks students to think deeply, work collaboratively and create solutions to complex problems under pressure. Success therefore belongs not only to those who present the final response, but to every student who listens, contributes, adapts and helps the team move forward.
Whether performing on a stage, representing BMGS on the sporting field, preparing for examinations or solving a complex challenge with others, our students continue to give us much to enjoy and celebrate. I thank them for the effort, energy, courage and joy they bring to the life of our School.
Where Do the Children Play?
In 1970, Cat Stevens released ‘Where Do the Children Play?’, the opening track on his album Tea for the Tillerman. (I know you are now playing it in your mind). The song emerged from an era that was increasingly preoccupied with technological progress, urban expansion and humanity’s separation from the natural world. In the song, Cat Stevens looks at our enthusiasm for taller buildings, faster machines and ever-increasing productivity, then asks a reasonably simple question: in the world we are constructing, where will the children play?
More than fifty years later, the question remains, although perhaps the landscape under threat is no longer only the physical one. I wonder whether we are now encroaching upon something less visible: the cognitive and emotional space in which childhood happens.
This is the space where imagination grows, where curiosity is free to wander without having to produce anything, and where creativity is limited only by time. It is the space in which children can be bored long enough to invent something, uncertain long enough to think, and frustrated long enough to discover that difficulty can be overcome.
Increasingly, this space is being occupied by timetables, assessment, adult direction, organised activities and screens.
None of this is an argument against academic rigour. Children deserve excellent teaching, rich knowledge, intellectual challenge and teachers who hold high expectations for them. Literacy and numeracy matter enormously because they open doors to further learning and fuller participation in the world. However, academic achievement is only one dimension of education; it is not its complete purpose.
Late last year I had the chance to visit Tasmania with two of our early learning educators Danie Mackin and Katie Walters to hear from Ben Mardell. Ben is a leading early childhood education expert and research principal investigator for the Project Zero initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. One thing he spoke about was the independence afforded to children and links to high achievement later in school for those students.
He spoke of young children walking or riding to school, serving themselves or making their own lunch using real plates and cutlery, moving confidently through shared spaces and assuming everyday responsibilities without an adult constantly hovering nearby. He spoke of how longitudinal studies showed the marked improvement in long term learning and life outcomes for these students.
I certainly noticed this on our recent trip with Stage 3 students to Victoria. Those students who attended, given an expectation of being able, capable and appropriately independent, stepped into that expectation willingly. I believe those students came back slightly changed over those eight days.
It made me think about how much we now do for children. We want them to become resilient, resourceful, confident and capable of solving problems. We want them to cope when life does not proceed according to plan. Yet in our understandable desire to care for them, we can remove some of the experiences through which those qualities develop.
A child forgets something, so we deliver it. A friendship becomes complicated, so we contact the school. A task feels difficult, so we explain every step. A child is bored, so we provide entertainment. Most of the time we do these things because we care, but care can quietly become rescue, and repeated rescue can unintentionally communicate to children that they are not capable of managing difficulty without us.
Sometimes the most helpful response may be to pause and ask: “What have you tried?”, “What do you think you could do next?” or “Would you like me to help you think about it?”
These questions do not communicate indifference. They communicate confidence. They tell a child: I am here, but I also believe you are capable.
These experiences may not resemble conventional academic learning, but an enormous amount of learning is taking place. Children are negotiating, imagining, communicating, persisting, judging risk, managing disappointment and responding when other people do not behave as expected. Play is not a break from development. It is one of the principal ways development occurs (Yogman et al., 2018).
These ideas also connect with some pastoral approach work we are beginning at BMGS as we investigate what it might mean to say, “We are Crew, not passengers!”
A passenger usually experiences a journey passively. Someone else determines the destination, someone else flies the plane or drives the train, someone else plans the route and takes responsibility when something goes wrong. Passengers are shown to their seats, served their meals, entertained and cared for. They may enjoy the journey, but they are not responsible for making it happen.
Crew members on the other hand have a different relationship with the journey. They contribute by noticing what needs to be done and taking responsibility for doing it. They understand that their choices affect everyone else. They do not ask only, “Am I okay?” but also, “Is everyone else okay, and what can I do to help?” The crew succeeds together, and when difficulties arise, everyone has a part to play.
This is why the idea has particular importance for our school. We do not want students to experience BMGS as passengers whose learning, relationships and wellbeing are managed entirely by adults. We want them to understand that they are participants in the life of the School, and that they have responsibilities to themselves, to their learning, to their peers and to the wider community.
“We are Crew” gives practical expression to several of our School values and associated behaviours. It asks students to invest in their community, to step forward when something needs to be done, to take personal responsibility and to use their influence to help someone else grow. Belonging is not understood simply as being welcomed or looked after. It also means accepting some responsibility for the community to which we belong.
For this reason, we are beginning to examine how our pastoral systems might become increasingly Crew-based rather than predominantly adult-led. This does not mean adults withdrawing from their responsibilities or expecting children to manage complex matters alone. Nor does it mean that students will be left without appropriate guidance, boundaries or care.
It means designing pastoral experiences in which students do more than receive support. They learn to offer it, develop the capacity to listen, contribute, resolve ordinary difficulties, reflect honestly, encourage others and take responsibility for the culture of their group. Adults still provide structure, wisdom and protection, but they resist doing for young people what, with appropriate support and some productive struggle, young people can learn to do for themselves.
A Crew-based pastoral approach also challenges the culture of rescue and repair. If adults solve every problem, organise every experience and carry every responsibility, students remain passengers. They may feel well cared for, but they do not necessarily learn how to care for others or contribute to something larger than themselves.
We know an education at BMGS will prepare children for adulthood, but we will not treat childhood merely as the waiting room for it. In our approach, children are not simply future workers, future university students or future contributors to the national economy. They are people whose lives matter now.
I do not have a neat answer to Cat Stevens' question, but I think it is one we should continue asking: Where do the children play?
They play wherever adults have the wisdom to leave some space unfilled. They play where curiosity does not have to justify itself, where reasonable risk is permitted, where boredom is not treated as an emergency, and where children are trusted to discover that they are more capable than they imagined.
I close with a line from another Cat Stevens song On the Road to Find Out where he says “There’s so much left to know.”
Perhaps that is the hopeful task before us: to give children the time, trust and freedom to discover it. Our responsibility is not to plan every moment of their journey or remove every obstacle from their path. It is to help them become active members of the crew, capable of learning with curiosity, serving others and stepping with courage into a world still waiting to be explored.
Warm regards
Steven Coote
Principal
References
EL Education. (n.d.). We are Crew: A teamwork approach to school culture.
Stevens, C. (1970). Where do the children play? [Song]. On Tea for the Tillerman. Island Records.
Yogman, M., Garner, A., Hutchinson, J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. M. (2018). The power of play: A pediatric role in enhancing development in young children. Pediatrics, 142(3), e20182058. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2018-2058
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