INTERIM HEAD OF CAMPUS UPDATE – 22 JUNE 2017

The mid-year break is imminent. Many of our Year 9 students are heading off on the Oodnadatta Trek with some SMS students and a number of BGS staff, and some of our senior French students from SMS and BGS are heading off to an intensive French opportunity in New South Wales. For others, it will be a time to spend with family and friends, and to be refreshed for the second semester’s journey, for its challenges and opportunities. The Year 10 Presentation Ball on Saturday 24 June will mark the conclusion of term for that year group. As the reports for Semester One come online, the evidence of each boy’s learning and engagement will be available for parents, and for student self-reflection about how best to take responsibility for making Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development a reality in Semester Two.

The wonderfully green oval is on track for the start of Term 3, accessible once more to the patient young men of Berwick Grammar School, and we thank all those who have made its restoration possible. Landscaping opportunities ahead notwithstanding, this space lies at the heart of this campus. We also acknowledge and thank our Captain of Art, Eddie Huynh, for responding to an invitation to design a range of posters for use on all three campuses, reminding students about the important issue of Child Safety, and for his terrific artwork.

I would like to thank the students, staff, and families at Berwick Grammar School for their warm welcome and inclusion of me in their school community life over the past several months.  A school, as I have said elsewhere, is neither the buildings nor its institutional history nor even its fine campus – it is always the individuals of which it is comprised. Tennyson’s poem ‘Ulysses’ tells us that ‘I am a part of all that I have met’, and so are we all. The future of St Margaret’s and Berwick Grammar School is an exciting horizon of expectation for the young men and women whose learning is shaped by their time here, supported by those fine professional men and women whose commitment and loyalty to the students in their care are manifest.  I thank Ms Annette Rome for the opportunity she extended to me to spend a little time with you this year. Go well into the rest of 2017, and thereafter.

Dr Deane Blackler
Interim Head, Berwick Grammar School