From the Principal

Aspire. Achieve. Flourish.

As parents, we all want our children to do well at school. We celebrate strong results and the milestones that mark their progress along the way; these are the stories we love sharing here in eLink each fortnight. But when I think about what I most hope for our young people, results are not where my mind goes first. I hope they know themselves well enough to understand their strengths and challenges. I hope they can navigate setbacks, find the strength and humility to seek support when they need it, and keep moving forward when they make poor decisions or things don't go to plan. I hope they develop the resilience to flourish.

This feels particularly relevant as we navigate Term 3. This time of the school year is notoriously demanding and asks more from all of us. The days are colder and shorter, the energy levels of both students are staff are often lower, and for our Year 12 students, the pressure of their final year of school and upcoming exams is very real. These are the moments when social and emotional skills become especially important.

This year marks a milestone for Girton Grammar as we celebrate fifteen years of RULER. Developed at Yale University, RULER is an evidence-based approach to social and emotional intelligence that helps children learn to Recognise, Understand, Label, Express and Regulate their emotions. For fifteen years, our teachers have worked intentionally to help students understand that emotions are valuable sources of information that can help us better understand ourselves and respond effectively to the world around us. In the Senior School, this learning continues through Wellio, ensuring age-appropriate skills develop alongside our students as they grow. We were honoured to receive a personal message from Marc Brackett, founding Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence:

We see the impact of this work every day. It can be seen in a Junior School student taking time to reset in our Body Break room or approaching a challenge with persistence. It can be seen in a Senior School student who takes time to reflect, takes responsibility for a poor choice, or has the maturity to acknowledge when they have acted before fully understanding a situation. These are all examples of emotional intelligence in action.

Today's young people are growing up in a world that is more connected and complex than we have known. Our youngest students, ‘Generation Alpha’, are the first generation to have grown up entirely alongside smartphones and social media. Previous generations often learned to sit with a difficult feeling, or work through boredom and disappointment, simply because unstructured time and fewer distractions gave them the space to do so. But today's students have less of that space, at the same age when they are faced with pressure to grow up faster than they need to. This makes deliberate, explicit teaching of these skills more important than it has ever been before. Our RULER and Wellio programs give students a practical framework for developing these capabilities on purpose.

Our commitment to this work was recognised internationally last year when Girton was named a 2025 RULER Spotlight School, the first school in the Southern Hemisphere to receive this recognition. However, while this achievement is significant, what I am most proud of is the culture that has been built over the past fifteen years at Girton. RULER has become part of who we are as a school community.

I thank Vanessa Juergens, Prue Milner, Joanne Christie and the many staff members who have contributed to this work over the years. Most importantly, I value what it means for our students: that at Girton, we care just as deeply about who they are becoming as we do about what they achieve.

Dr Emma O'Rielly

Principal