Global competency at St Margaret’s Anglican Girls School

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Karen Gorrie

Deputy Principal

GLOBAL COMPETENCY

at St Margaret’s Anglican Girls School

The importance St Margaret’s places on global citizenship is explicitly acknowledged and embedded in its practices in many ways. The school’s mission states that it '…aims to provide excellence in learning and teaching within a broad, balanced and flexible curriculum complemented by other school activities, preparing confident, compassionate, capable women able to contribute in a global community'. The school’s mission was again recently articulated in its new Strategic Plan entitled ‘A Local School with a Global Outlook 2020 - 2025’. For the first time, the strategic plan also outlined an Envisioned Future for 2025, which signposts St Margaret’s as 'an innovative school which has a global outlook’. Two of the strategies sitting under the goal of ‘Strengthening the St Margaret’s Experience’ pay particular attention to this global outlook. They are: • To ensure a focus on developing our students’ global outlook; specifically, enabling resilient and responsible engagement in a multicultural and globalising world • To develop our careers and employability programs for

Years 9 to 12 which help students identify and develop the necessary skills to participate, thrive and lead in a global economy. As a school we have long promoted and believed in fostering global citizenship in our students, and our language, goals and underlying mission mirror that belief. More importantly, we provide many opportunities to open our students’ minds and broaden their horizons to ensure they are ready to enter a global community once they graduate. As a boarding school with around 186 full time boarders from Years 5 to 12, who all come from geographically widespread locations, the school places a high value on diversity. Our boarders hail from rural and regional areas across Australia; we have partnered with Yalari for many years to offer Indigenous scholarships; we have international students from many different countries; and daughters of ex-pat Australians living overseas also attend the school. This cultural and geographic fusion combines with the day school which is also quite diverse, bringing a cultural richness to the entire school community, which is widely celebrated and from which everyone benefits. Some years ago, the school wanted to further broaden the opportunities for our students to experience global cultures and learn new skills beyond the classroom, beyond their hometown, and beyond the Australian borders. We introduced a Global Exchange Program – a robust experiential program that would provide students with an opportunity for incredible personal growth. This program is specifically for our Year 10 students. Students who are successful in being selected for the program spend one term at a partner school in another country. As it is a reciprocal exchange, it means that their partner will come and spend a term at St Margaret’s.

The Year 10 Global Exchange Program enables St Margaret’s students to:

• acquire and further develop new skills in problem solving, independent decision making and social poise • expand cultural and ethnic awareness • enhance their passion for learning • become exceptional ambassadors of the program overseas and in the St Margaret’s community. The program promotes the vision of the school in providing unique opportunities for students to participate in global citizenship in the context of school and family life and encourages active demonstration of the six core values of St Margaret’s – passion, respect, spirit, integrity, courage and faith.

Pre-COVID, each year approximately one third of the Year 10 cohort participated in a global exchange opportunity for eight to ten weeks. Not only do our students leave our school, travel to one of our partner schools abroad, and send regular updates on their progress, as it is a reciprocal exchange, the school also welcomes and accommodates (with our families or in the boarding house) the same amount of students. While only one third of the Year 10 cohort individually engage in the exchange by travelling to other countries, the whole school population benefits from receiving the same number of ‘foreign’ exchange students to our school. They enter our families’ lives, the boarding house and, most importantly, our daily lessons and extra-curricular activities. As a community we thrive on welcoming these students each year and everyone within the school, whether or not they partake in the exchange, truly benefits from the injection of different cultures into the community each year. The school currently partners with 11 schools in six countries across the globe in this reciprocal exchange program. They are: • Crofton House School, Vancouver,

British Columbia, Canada • Shawnigan Lake School, Vancouver Island,

British Columbia, Canada • Saint-Nom-de-Marie, Montreal, Canada • Ursulinenschule Hersel, Bornheim, Germany • Konan Girls High School, Kobe, Japan • Nga Tawa, Wellington Diocesan School for Girls, Marton,

New Zealand • St Margaret's College, Christchurch, New Zealand (Rowing Exchange) • St Anne's Diocesan College, Hilton, South Africa • St Mary's Diocesan School for Girls, Kloof, South Africa • Chatham Hall, Chatham, Virginia, USA • Augusta Preparatory Day School, Martinez, Georgia, USA These exchanges include schools where their first language is not English, notably our partner schools in Montreal, Japan and Germany. Additionally, students from South African schools will often speak Afrikaans as their first language. Students attending these schools do not need to speak the local language. Language has never been a barrier to our students attending and indeed thriving on exchanges to these schools. The length of the exchange – a whole term – is purposeful. This timeframe allows for growth across multiple areas: maturity; the transferrable skills of problem solving; global knowledge; and intercultural understanding. These all directly translate back to their educational journey at school. Of note is that many girls who go on exchange are often successful in gaining leadership positions in the school in Year 12. We credit the growth in maturity and skills gained in working with others to their leadership success. Students are selected for the Global Exchange Program based on how they reflect and embody the core values of St Margaret’s, their academic standing, personal motivation and participation in school activities. Students selected must demonstrate initiative, strong communication skills, social maturity and resilience. They must complete the online Cultural intelligence (CQ) test as a requirement of exchange selection. The test is designed to measure the individual’s CQ Drive, Knowledge, Strategy and Action. The students are asked several questions and they then come up with a self-rating score that summarises scores across four capabilities. Students are selected on their suitability as an ambassador for St Margaret’s Anglican Girls School and their ability to adapt and function independently in new environments. COVID has presented new and hopefully short-term challenges to this highly successful program. The school has kept in regular contact with our overseas exchange partners. In some ways this ‘keeping in touch’, via email or Microsoft Teams, has been more meaningful and more frequent. There are plans afoot for students from Chatham Hall in Virginia to soon meet with our Year 10 boarders via Microsoft Teams on a ‘virtual exchange’. The school has also initiated some domestic exchanges to provide some form of exchange opportunity. Interestingly, interstate schools (perhaps without having experienced the benefits an exchange program offers) were reluctant to commit to a full term’s exchange. Therefore, the domestic exchanges have been adapted to be from two to six weeks in duration. Nevertheless, we hope our students will still receive many of the benefits they would have received from participating in a longer-term global exchange. One thing COVID has cemented is how interconnected we are. We really are one big village. We look forward to continuing and growing our global connections for our students in future years. SUNATA 35