School for Student Leadership
During Term 1, six of our Year 9 students - Isaac, Rose, Luke, Emily, Lotte and Peter - spent a term at the School for Student Leadership, located at Dinner Plain, in the Victorian Alps. They lived and studied alongside over 40 Year 9 students from a range of schools across Victoria.
This is a Victorian Department of Education and Training (DET) initiative offering a unique residential education experience for year 9 students. The curriculum focuses on personal development and team learning projects sourced from students' home regions.
The program is tailored to develop leadership skills in students, with a strong focus on outdoor education and experiential learning. Students develop a range of skills around resilience, empathy, independence, collaboration and emotional management.
The photos below give you just a brief taste of the types of experiences that our students were given. The photos are publicly available via the School for Student Leadership's Facebook page. I encourage you to have a look yourself if you like!
Two of the students - Isaac and Rose - have shared with you their experiences of the term.
For our current Year 8 students, more information will be available later in the year about how to apply for this once in a lifetime experience in 2026.
Mark Oudshoorn
Assistant Principal
Hello, my name is Isaac. I am one of the six students that had the chance to go to the School for Student Leadership. My time at the School for Student Leadership (SSL) was one of the most amazing and memorable experiences of my life.
Here is a little about my successes and challenges there and about how amazing of an opportunity it is to step up and become a better person and leader.
Indeed, SSL offers countless opportunities in both outdoor activities and leadership skills. The whole program is made so that young people in year 9 live a term away from their families with around 45 other students and learn the importance of being part of a community and how to give back to that community. Every day, students have multiple lessons as they would in a normal school but with different subjects that aim to make them better leaders. Some of those subjects include emotional management, collaboration, empathy, health and wellbeing and many more. These may sound a bit strange at first but believe me, the skills learnt during those lessons are so important and can change so many things about your routine and about the way you think.
Another aspect of the program is to be away from phones and screens for the whole term. You are in fact not allowed your phone there and even though the Leadership School provides you with a laptop to email your parents, you are not allowed watching YouTube or playing video games. This is not as bad as it sounds since you spend so much time outdoors or with other people that you quickly shape a new routine and get used to that limited screen time.
One of my biggest challenges there was to meet all these new people and to form respectful relationships with them. That applied to me for the whole first week there but you quickly get used to living with the same people every day and it is in the end a great experience.
One of my biggest successes was something that we call “expo”. Expos are hikes in which you and a group of other students at the Leadership School go out for two to three days and learn how to set a campsite, how to cook with a trangia and how to collaborate with your teammates to spend a great time hiking. It was my biggest success because of all the magnificent views that we got to see out there hiking from the top of mountains to little creeks and rivers.
Finally, I would like to say that it is an amazing experience and that anyone in year 8 right now should definitely try it when the school mentions it later in the year. Trust me, you will not regret it.
Isaac 9A
Words quite literally can’t express how much I loved my time at the School for Student Leadership Alpine Campus. In the nine weeks I was there, I made so many amazing friends and memories that I know will be with me for a very long time.
Throughout the term we engaged in lots of different activities, both outdoors and indoors, and I learned about so many things, like the natural environment around us, leadership skills, and even ourselves and what shapes our identity. In the classroom, we learned about things like identity and having a growth mindset.
The SSL also provided us with opportunities like LLP day, where students from the local primary school came to our campus and we taught them about one of the nine learning concepts that are in the curriculum at the SSL. These nine learning concepts each relate to a different school value. The three school values were Self-belief, Relationships and Connectedness. I think learning about these values, which are different to GEC’s values, was really eye opening and an interesting approach to learning how to work on yourself and become a better person.
Different outdoor activities like mountain biking and overnight expeditions taught us about things like resilience, and brought us wonderful memories like sitting around our campfire and playing mafia until way past our bedtime, and roasting marshmallows, and some not so great memories like face planting into a bush.
One of my favourite parts of the SSL was the people I met. I got the chance to meet and work with so many different people from different places. We all had our different groups, like the girls wing, our expo groups and of course our school groups, but overall we were just one really big friend group, and I honestly wouldn’t have it any other way. I got close with a lot of people from other schools, but also with people from my school group. We went from being a group that maybe knew of each other, or were friends with only a couple of people in the group, to becoming really great friends. Emily, Peter, Lotte, Isaac, Luke and I defintiely grew a lot closer through activities like expeditions, but also through our CLP classes, where we maybe laughed a bit more than we worked, but those are still some of my favourite memories!
Speaking of our CLP, I am really looking forward to seeing how this Community Learning Project work out! We started working on this project to benefit our local community in week 1 of the program, and like I said before, sometimes we defintiely wasted a little bit more time than we should have, but we got some really great work done in the end. Now that we are back at school I think we are all starting to see everything fall into place. I’m so excited to see our hard work be rewarded, and see how the community comes together for a good cause!
Though the thought of not getting to spend another term at the Alpine school makes me a bit sad, I do not regret a single thing, and I am so glad that I went and got to experience this unique adventure. To the year 8s or their parents who are considering applying, I really encourage you to do so, you will not regret it! To those who are not so sure about applying, I can tell you that I was exactly in the same boat as you! I was not sure at all if I wanted to go, but it ended up being one of the best things I think I have done. Please at least try!
Rose 9B