6 minute read
Headmaster
Dr Alec O’Connell
Headmaster
A community is nothing without its partners
In the previous edition of Clan, I spoke about the importance of giving. Since that time, we held our online Give to the Gooch day, which was an incredible success and reminded us of the generosity of our community and why partnerships are critical to the future of schools.
Scotch has always been a school that has prioritised its community and, here, our partnerships are essential. We have longterm partnerships with our sister school, Presbyterian Ladies’ College, running cross-campus classes and collaborating on our Drama productions, and Balga Senior High School, where we provide peer-to-peer tutoring support. In June, we announced a new partnership with St Hilda’s Anglican School for Girls for a joint Rowing programme and welcomed a shared Head of Rowing, Paul Bolton.
Our partnerships enable us to expand our offerings; to tap into underutilised resources. You would never build a stadium purely for
football or cricket; you have to be smarter than that. Major projects should not just serve one part of the community. It is important to look for opportunities to share resources wherever possible; to recognise when to diversify; to bring others on board to enjoy the benefits.
Our Rowing partnership with St Hilda’s, which will see our soon to be refurbished Boat Shed used year-round, exemplifies this. Opened in 1914 for just 20 rowers, the Boat Shed has served generations of Scotch rowers and has seen our programme grow to encompass over 100 rowers. Thanks to our new licensing agreement, we are very proud to be working with St Hilda’s to expand the use of this iconic Scotch building, following the refurbishment’s completion in 2022. It is also important to recognise that due to the time and circumstances in which many Perth boys’ schools were founded, we have access to expansive playing fields. This is one of the reasons why we welcome collaborations with other schools and particularly girls’
schools. Rightly so, sporting programmes such as AFL, Soccer and Cricket, which historically were seen as mainly the domain of boys’ schools, have now expanded into girls’ sporting programmes. As such initiatives expand and grow, we have to look for opportunities to work with and support girls’ schools that may not have immediate access to the required playing fields or other associated sporting facilities.
Our current relationships with PLC and St Hilda’s are invaluable in offering our students the chance to interact and form relationships with those of the opposite gender. Not only do our cross-campus classes with PLC enable us to expand our subject offering, but they are also an opportunity to further class discussions and expose our students to diverse perspectives. At Scotch, we recognise that women and men experience the world differently and that respecting others comes from understanding, empathy and experience.
At Scotch, service to others is paramount, and our relationship with Balga is integral to this. Our students visit Balga weekly to lend support, tutoring their peers in intensive English units and other classes. Before COVID-19, Balga students visited Scotch to join our assemblies and attend our productions. We have also done various donation drives, including collecting footy boots for their teams, after realising that some students were playing in bare feet.
It is a partnership that pre-dates my time at Scotch and one that I think is equally significant to both schools. For Balga, our students are a one-on-one resource, assisting in their English as a Second Language programme, designed for refugees and immigrants newly arrived in Australia. Of course, partnerships are about connection and, for Scotch, our relationship with Balga is a reminder that being a leader starts with serving others. It is also an opportunity for all students to connect with peers, who have often lived very different lives to their own.
We value being an independent boys’ school but we are always conscious that, in life, when you graduate, you work with people of different genders and from diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. We firmly believe in the importance of teaching open-mindedness and acceptance. Our International Baccalaureate curriculum exemplifies this. A core curricula partnership, the IB is designed to produce graduates who are principled, reflective, caring and empathetic to those in the world around them. In other words, it produces balanced graduates with a global outlook. The world, after all, is a vast melting pot, and there is no ‘normal’ way of living in it.
In recent years, we have expanded our Balga partnership to offer a Moderator’s bursary to one of their students to attend Scotch College for Years 11 and 12, supported by the Uniting Church and their Moderator. Our 2020 scholarship graduate, Arad Rad, has since been accepted into the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts. Having witnessed the impression that he made at Scotch, I very much look forward to seeing what he will achieve at one of the country’s leading creative institutions.
By embedding service into our curriculum, we hope that students will understand its value and continue volunteering their time long after leaving school. Every Friday afternoon, our Year 10s undertake service activities, from looking after Lake Claremont with the Friends of Lake Claremont to supporting those with chronic mental health conditions at the Romily House Care Facility or working with Riding for the Disabled. Our Year 8s all undertake the Community Project. This self-driven, service-focused project is part of the Middle Years Programme and sees Year 8s choose a cause or organisation and design and implement a project in support.
Our partnership with the Public Schools Association is our longest-running relationship. Scotch is a founding member of the PSA, which began in 1905 and now connects seven schools. PSA Sport is an iconic part of the Scotch experience, and its ability to create shared memories amongst the students and families of its member schools is an important part of life at Scotch. After all, we might be seven schools, but we are one community. I have been pleased to see the PSA expand its offering in connecting our community beyond Sport. Scotch is an eager participant in the PSA’s invitational events including PSA Chess, supported by the soon to be retired Curriculum Leader, Science Reg Reberger, and the inaugural PSA Theatre Sports Competition, held in August 2021.
COVID-19 has brought many hardships, but it has also demonstrated the value of community and socialising role that schools play. Schools are far more than institutions of knowledge and learning; they are places where relationships are formed, and the ability to build lifelong relationships is learned. At Scotch, we are always looking to work with and support our community. You see this in the way our Playing Fields are open to everyone – to families, individuals and professional sporting teams. We have seen Perth Glory, the Scorchers and Claremont Football Club all train here, and that is just naming a few. It is a special thing, that the local community can form shared memories of our school, whether or not they attended Scotch. They can walk their dogs on the oval, pop down on the weekend or in the afternoon to watch a game or join a school holiday activity. After all, as our community knows, there is real joy in being able to give.