Year 12 Pastoral Guardian

Welcome, parents and carers, to the 2022 school year, and congratulations on getting your offspring to the beginning of Year 12!  My name is Natalie Dean, and I am the Acting Year 12 Pastoral Guardian for Term 1 this year, while Karen Farrow takes some well-earned long service leave.  The Year 12s have been kind and welcoming to me as I find my feet and try to fill Mrs Farrow’s shoes.

What a year it will be – and it is off to a fabulous, if slightly disrupted, beginning.

Our Year 12 cohort has admirably coped with the disappointments and disruptions COVID-19 has brought, including the delay to the Formal, and the changes to the Tie Ceremony. The students were so proud and excited to receive their ties, and the lunchtime following the ceremony was certainly joyous!  This symbol is an important one to mark the students’ transition to Year 12, and they certainly appreciated the significance of their new tie.

The students have so far managed to embrace our 2022 theme of Courage, as they face the uncertainties and challenges of Year 12 with resilience.  Our leaders swiftly stepped up to the challenge of a fundraiser for Valentine’s Day, where over $1000 was raised for the charity Love Your Sister, supporting cancer research.  Quite a feat, considering they had less than a week back on campus to organise it! 

This is a message I have communicated to our Year 12 cohort which I would like to mention here: 

Do the work and the results will follow.

Very few people can say they have finished everything.  The Year 12 teachers will be filling their class OneNotes with plenty of work and activities, so there is always more the students can be doing – and doing the work is the best way to achieve the desired results.

At our first online Cohort meeting, I told the students this story:

Imagine you are playing football, and it is raining.  The ground has turned to mud, and soon the ball is muddy and slippery.  Someone kicks it to you, and it is so covered in mud that it slips out of your hands.  What do you say to yourself?

• Are you the person who says, “It wasn’t my fault – the ball was slippery!”
• Or are you the person who says: “I need to practise catching slippery footballs.”?

We should all aspire to be the person who takes each failure as a lesson, each challenge as a skill to master, and each problem as a way to find a solution.  Have the courage to admit when you need help, and to know that you can always learn.

Handling the transition to Year 12 can be challenging and daunting, especially when the students came back on campus to face Week 3, and began having to dive into their next task. School TV currently has some resources and articles around the theme of Transition, which I would like to recommend to you.

Best of luck to you, as you parent your Year 12 offspring to success this year!