Around the Senior School

Round Square Zoom Postcard

Six students in Year 10 recently attended a Round Square Zoom Postcard, hosted by Flintridge Sacred Heart School in California on 'Embracing the Complexities of Change'. Alice Wilson tuned in from home due to the flooding crisis near her home and the other students attended whilst in the library.

Students listened to four different guest speakers including an actor/professor, two current students and a current teacher from the school. Everyone embraced the idea that 'fear is good, it directs the actions you need to take' and 'fear may force us to grow up quicker than we want to'.

After the guest speakers we were split into baraza groups to delve a little deeper into the topic and share our thoughts amongst a smaller group of students and teachers.

Thank you to George Wakem, Phoebe Neville, Alice Wilson, Sarah Lawson, Nina Smedley and Sophie Smith, for facing your fears and embracing the complexities of change.

Year 7 Incursion: Tut Roadshow - 18 November 2022

Year 7 students enjoyed a day at our PLC campus on Friday when the Tutankhamun (Tut) Roadshow visited our school. Students engaged in a range of exciting activities like investigating Tut’s tomb and wall paintings, working on ancient writings, considering the role of security in the ancient world by working with seals, considering the wonders of archaeology and by visiting the Tut Truck and finding out about ‘code breaking’ and the discovery of tut’s tomb in 1922.  

We were very fortunate to have the Tut Roadshow come to school this year, being the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the tomb. It was a beautiful Orange day and the students had a great time mixing and relaxing on the lawns during recess and lunch. A big thanks to Ms Skinner for organising such a fun and rewarding day and a big thank to the PLC staff for allowing us to use their site. 

Bruce Paine

International Student Exchange 2023 – Exciting News

In 2023 we will be recommencing our International Exchange Program for Year 10 students. The student application information is now available on the Hub, with interviews to take place from Week 4 of Term 1. Parents of Year 10 students for 2023 will shortly receive an invitation to attend an information session in-person or remotely. In order to provide a valuable experience for our incoming international exchange students, we are also looking for host families within our community. Should you wish to receive further information regarding becoming a host family, please click on the below link. 

Request for Host Family Information  

The Student International Exchange Co-Ordinator is Mr Andrew Ryan and he can be contacted at aryan@kws.nsw.edu.au 

World Children’s Day Blog 

Max Bloomfield, Brown House Prefect

By having the privilege of attending a private school in an educationally-rich country, I’ve been quarantined from the reality of the current global education crisis. Escalating this, around 1000 days since the World Health Organization’s announcement of a global pandemic, as students return to school, countries are faced with the unprecedented issue of a global learning crisis. Although widespread in its effects, developing countries without digital educational resources to alleviate the stresses of lockdowns particularly suffered. Only now are we beginning to receive the benchmark results revealing the scale of the issue. A unified UNESCO and UNICEF report, Mission: Recovering Education 2021, focuses on three main priorities:

• Bringing all children back to schools
• Recovering learning losses
• Preparing and supporting teachers

These highlight international goals to fight the current crisis-level learning poverty* rates. These goals are achievable through government and private support with financial and human resources.

*Learning Poverty: a measure of children unable to read and understand a simple passage by age 10. 

Return To School

Many factors affect the re-opening of schools and continuation of education. Children from low-income households, children with disabilities, and girls were less likely to access remote learning due to limited availability of electricity, connectivity, devices, accessible technologies as well as discrimination and social and gender norms. Students who have been disadvantaged in these ways require in-person schooling to reverse the impacts of the pandemic. This is a struggle for financially poor countries without developed health systems, however international support from more privileged countries, like our own, reassures parents and countries that adequate safety measures will be in place. 

“Safely reopening schools and keeping them open must be the top priority, globally.”  Jessica Bergmann Education Researcher – UNICEF Office of Research.

Learning Losses

The pandemic and school closures not only jeopardised children’s health and safety with domestic violence and child labour increasing, but also impacted student learning substantially. The report indicates that in low and middle-income countries, the amount of children living in learning poverty – already above 50 percent before the pandemic – could reach 70 percent largely as a result of the long school closures and the relative ineffectiveness of remote learning. In South Asia and South America children lost on average 273 and 225 full days of school respectively, exacerbating inequalities in education. This would mean that all of the gains in learning poverty that low and middle-income countries recorded since 2000 have been lost during the pandemic. 

Preparing and supporting teachers

To recover from the educational losses, immediate action is required in: 

1. consolidating curriculums
2. extending time available for education
3. supporting teachers to provide structured, resourced and targeted lessons

This all requires adequate funding. The education and training sector had been allocated less than 3 percent of global stimulus packages. Much more funding will be needed for learning recovery if countries are to avert the long-term damage to productivity, literacy and numeracy rates. 

Final Thoughts

In writing this blog I considered what raising awareness meant. It can be easy to consider yourself aware once read on an issue but have no actual impact yourself. I urge you to start conversations with people around you about the global education crisis and encourage leaders to take action to the greatest scale possible, in the aim of decreasing learning poverty. 

Gunchaa, a 17-year-old #letmelearn education advocate in India, states “Education as a right and a "granted right" will open infinite doors of opportunities and possibilities for us, to explore, engage and enhance ourselves.” This is a crisis that will affect everyone, even the privileged, so everybody has a responsibility to help shape and rebuild the global education system of tomorrow.