Principal's Report

There are few times in life that we get to genuinely acknowledge and celebrate the contributions that an individual makes to a school community such as Warrnambool College.  A couple of weeks ago, such an opportunity arose as I sat in the audience of the Victorian Education Excellence awards ceremony.  It’s fair to say that there’s some pretty amazing things happening in Public Education in Victoria at the moment.  I was inspired and privileged to hear about many of these endeavours as the nominations for various team based award categories were read out over the course of the evening.  Selfishly though, my main interest for the evening lay in the individual award categories and specifically the ‘Outstanding Business Manager Award’.

Some months earlier we nominated Chris Dickson, our incredible Business Manager at Warrnambool College for this award.  As I sought references to support our application, many people from within and beyond our school offered their extremely positive reflections on Chris’s incredible contributions to education in South West Victoria.  As I said to Chris at the time, even if the nomination went no further, at least we knew explicitly the positive impact she was having on our school and others in our area.  I wasn’t shocked when Chris was shortlisted – after all as far as we’re concerned she is the best Business Manager going around.

But as I sat in the Regent Theatre in Melbourne with my fingers and toes crossed, I hoped that the judges had realised just how amazing Chris is and what she achieves for our school community each day.  Chris is a doer, an enabler, a constant source of support who always seems to have time to assist anyone when the need arises.  She leads her team of Education Support staff with sensitivity and pride.  She finds a way of funding various initiatives at our school that we’d otherwise go without.  As I said in my reference for her, if I could only nominate one person in my career for the education excellence awards, it would be Chris.

The Victorian Education Minister, the Hon. James Merlino, was given the task of reading out the successful awardees on the night.  I willed his mouth to form the sound ‘Cr’ and then burst into spontaneous applause and hoots of delight when he announced ‘Christine Dickson’ as the winner.  It was a delight to share this moment with Chris and the rest of the audience.  Chris is never looking for specific recognition with all that she does and achieves at our school.  She always maintained that she’d only accepted the nomination because she felt that it might help our school’s great achievements to be acknowledged by others.  And so she was very humble when on stage receiving the award – deflecting the attention and acknowledging other’s contributions to student learning at Warrnambool College.

I’m proud of everything that we achieve at this school.  I’m proud that we can support students to be the best they can be.  I’m proud of what our staff achieve in their personal growth and development to be relevant and meaningful facilitators of learning.  And I thank Chris who enables so much of this to happen for our school community.

Kind Regards,

Dave Clift

Principal