student voice
VicSRC
Victorian Student Representative Council
2017 Congress
Eric Seychell
Year 10
Student Representative Council
Between the 10th and 12th of July, I was fortunate enough to attend the VicSRC Congress - an event that is best described as an explosionof student voice!
Over the three-day event, I was exposed to a wide range of new people, a plethora of different workshop opportunities and the ability to be a part of a team that all believed there was an issue that should be at forefront of the Victorian SRC’s to-do list.
There were twelve of these Action Teams (as they were aptly named). Working in these groups, we had two days to prepare a short presentation and three solutions to the issue our group believed was the biggest facing the education system.
The group I was a part of focused on the high drop-out rates from high schools. Currently, one in every four students leaves high school before completing Year 12 studies and we don't think that this is good enough. We discussed and put forward a variety of measures that could be put into place to reduce this statistic. Our discussions will be included in the Congress 2017 report.
As previously mentioned, there was also a wide variety of workshops that anyone could attend, ranging from So you want to be an exec? (a workshop that informed people on all the requirements of being an executive of the Victorian SRC) to Public Speaking 101 (a workshop on the different ways you can get an audience to sympathise with your speech). My personal favourite was Art as Advocacy - a workshop about how we the public can best communicate our ideas, solutions and awareness of issues using art forms, such as advertisements.
The show stopper of the event was the Mad Hatter themed Gala Night. Everyone was dressed up in extravagant costumes representing all the different characters from the Alice in Wonderland Story.
I would like to conclude by saying a huge thank you to the VicSRC to organising such an amazing event; I definitely want to be at next year’s Congress!