Category: Leadership

After exams, Year 10 students were asked if they wanted to apply for All Saints’s Peer Support program.

Now I am a Year 11, and I have just finished up the program. We’ve just had our last session. How time flies.

As part of Peer Support, the nine O’Connor Peer Support Leaders played fun games with the Year 8 students. Every Tuesday, the O’Connor Peer Support Leaders would meet to discuss the weeks activity. We took turns coordinating the activities and planning how they would run. The next Thursday, we would get to run that activity with the Year 8’s in Tutor Group. We played games such as Lava, the Continuum Game and Dodgeball, which were extremely enjoyable.

The thing about Peer Support however is that those games teach valuable life skills and messages, as well as being fun. The concepts we based our games on are based around the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, but also taught skills like avoiding procrastination, what people’s values were, and how it felt to be part of the minority in a group. These are all lessons I was taught when I was in Year 8, being taught by the Class of 2020. Now we are that Year 11 cohort, we could spread those messages to those Year 8’s.

I’ve made some great friendships in the Year 8 cohort, which I hope will keep going through this year and beyond. I would like to say thank you to Ms Lees and Ms Eddington for putting together an amazing program and giving me this opportunity to make a difference. To the other Peer Support Leaders of 2022, you were amazing to work with. Thank you for every happy memory.

In late 2020, I was selected to become a House Councillor for O’Connor. I felt very honoured to be considered for this role as a representative of the house I had been a part of since joining All Saints 10 years ago. This role was a yearly commitment to serve the house, and included many different responsibilities.

I flourished mainly in the logistical and management side of the role. Organising House events, celebrations and fundraisers gave me a sense of purpose within the House. I worked with amazing members of O’Connor, who all had their own skills and talents to bring to the table. Some of the events I helped to develop and present included the Headspace “Silly Socks” fundraiser and our Wellbeing Day event.

Every week or so, we would coordinate as a Council out on the lawns, where we would discuss upcoming events and plan out the existing ones. This environment was great for me to develop my confidence in sharing with my ideas with others – something I will bring into next year.

I sincerely thank Mr Beath and the House Captain for letting me be part of this great team.

A while ago, we went to Kalbarri for Year 9 camp.

It was an amazing camp, but it presented a lot of challenges. Everyone was out of their comfort zone. We had a lot of instances where some people did not contribute at all to jobs, while some people helped out immensely. This got to the point when we had huge arguments within our group as to who we were going to “sacrifice” to carry water, food etc.

Around Day 3 of camp, we decided, at a camp meeting, to come up with a system for jobs. This was because it was not very productive at all to stand around and wait for someone to “give in” and do a job.

The system was a simple acronym- CHEL. It represented the 4 main categories of jobs that had to be done everyday at our camp. It was short for Cooking (food distribution, carrying food etc,), Hygiene (in charge of soap, water, and cleaning implements), Environment (our cleanup crew, and who also organised clean-ups) and Leadership. This group was in charge of briefing the group, organising group votes, and had many other roles. Everyone got a role to start with, and we rotated through the roles. If you were Cooking group on Day 3, you were Hygiene 4^th day, Environment 5^th day etc. That way everyone knew what they were doing each day, and could plan ahead.

On the first day of this system, I volunteered to be Leadership, along with 2 other kids from my group. I showed leadership by leading on the hike and also making the decisions as to when we would eat, try to get to bed etc. We had one situation whether to have lunch early (truly the greatest debacle ever) and the leaders proposed a vote.

Another situation we had was finding a path to a spot called Nature’s Window. It’s beautiful, here’s a photo-

We were trying to find the path, and the leaders and I decided on the path we would take. Without this, we would still be there.

Outside of this system, I tried to be a leader as much as possible. We all had different challenges- packing tents up, packing bags, carrying bags etc- that were unique as ourselves. I remember one of my classmates saying to the group on the last day-

“Thank you to Ashleigh for helping me pack my bags when I was half asleep and couldn’t care less”.

– Divya Josey

Still my favourite memory from camp.

I absolutely loved being on camp, and would definitely do it again.

I have just received the news that I have been accepted into House Council for 2020. I am incredibly happy about this. I tried to get in in Year 8, but was not accepted. Hopefully the role gives me some good experience for positions in the future. I have a leadership day on the 26th of October now, and I think I will learn a lot from it.

I was voted in the Class Representative for 2019 for 8W. It is a great experience to have, and I really enjoy it. I hope it will prepare me for things in the future. This gave me the opportunity to meet with the other Class Reps and discuss things that we thing would improve the College. Right now, we are working on an electronic pinup Transition Board.