From the Principal

The Junior School Captains, together with Mr Farrer, Mr Nalder amd Mr Vedelsby enjoy a funny joke in between photographs

At a recent Open Morning, during which students take prospective families on a tour of the Kew campus and we meet around the cakes and cups of tea afterwards, I was asked while in the centre of a circle, ‘What do you expect of a Trinity student?’ It is a great question. It is a positive variation on questions around a point of difference or ‘Why choose Trinity?’. I suppose that there are many answers that could be offered – think great citizens, high achievers, good people or any variation of those – but my immediate thought was one that I had experienced years earlier when the prospect of me coming to Trinity was first suggested. But more on that later.

If you note the lift out education pages in the mainstream papers that appear every six months or so, you tend to see picture after picture of smiling children in different uniforms. Understanding the spirit, intent and value of a school setting can be a challenge for parents, and articulating those elements can be challenging for schools. Similar schools to ours are, like us, aspirational. They seek to give their students a really good run up at life across all of their pursuits. Academic success is prized, authentic opportunity to compete on the sporting field is valued and performance opportunities are cherished. Insight into cultural and spiritual understanding is sought after. It can feel like it is a crowded marketplace.

It isn’t. The strategic planning process which has been the work of the last 18 or so months, has been revealing on a number of fronts. It has been able to reflect the worth our community places on a values education. Since our inception in 1903, we have been notable for a more understated manner than other prominent schools and we have reflected Headmaster Frank Shann’s words from 1929 accurately:

‘Trinity differs from other independent schools chiefly in one particular. The aim has been to emphasise the value of moral training as distinct from merely intellectual.’ Our enrolment data reflects this idea keenly. Trinity people place creating good people as our most important work. Our forming strategy will capture that idea.

In our strategic planning process so far, I have been lucky enough to engage with many students, with all staff, with the committee members of the Parents’ Association, Class Reps and OTGA, and repeatedly with School Council as we seek to form the pathway into our imminent future. At our recent TGS Community Forum, I was also able to invite any members of our school community to engage with our process and proposed form and content. I am grateful to those who have been a part of the process of discernment up to this point as we look ‘towards 2030’. I look forward to providing more opportunity for engagement in the next term as our planning sharpens appreciably.

The context of our planning is that we have been surrounded by COVID’s realities. Moving from wholesale lockdowns to family-specific ones enabled a broadly consistent term for students and staff, and their efforts to work together to best effect has been impressive to witness. It has again highlighted our community’s resilience and the preparedness of all to swiftly move to the latest iteration of teaching and learning at all levels. I am very grateful to students, to the tireless staff and to all families for the approach. It is taxing, though. Our strategy will reflect that as we have created ‘two horizons’. The first will get us through and beyond COVID’s impact, the next will be ‘towards 2030’ and will reach further.

Of course, if our strategy were to require of us that we provide a contemporary approach and curriculum, top grade sporting experiences, highly visible performance opportunities, committed and innovative staff, and worthy facilities, then we are already going well! This term’s return to so much of that which we value – an enjoyable HPAF, a Cricket Premiership, successful productions and so much more – reminds us that a significant part of the plan should be to honour what we already do and care about. We will.

In January of 2013 my wife and I were driving towards Wangaratta, away from Melbourne, and we were about to embark on a new life with our children in the country. I was about to start as Principal of Cathedral College. Despite the conviction we had about this direction, during the trip she asked me if I there was a school I would come back to Melbourne for. My response was, ‘Trinity’. When pushed on why, I told her that I felt like it was the school at which I felt I could absolutely be me. A number of years later I can say that I was right. And I can also say that is the best answer to the question I received during that Open Morning. What I expect of a Trinity student is that they can feel, and be, themselves. The best version of themselves.

Now that is a plan.

Adrian Farrer

Principal