The Year Twelve Class of 2025

The My School website, while still containing data relating to academic performance, also carried data demonstrating the results of student wellbeing surveys carried out by the Australian Council for Educational Research. Parents found this information invaluable, as the happiness and wellbeing of their children was of far greater importance than their academic performance. Although of course, in most cases those schools with the higher wellbeing scores, also tended to have higher academic scores. Today that just seems like commonsense.

Schools became environments where students learnt first and foremost; about themselves, the world, and what role they could play to make it a better place. Academic subjects still played an important role of course, as did the ever present standardised tests. But importantly they were put into context. A student’s identity at school, their aspirations and vocational prospects, were no longer solely determined by academic ability.

Armed with a 21^stcentury education, the best in the world; we will watch on as the class of 2025 shape our world and that of our grandchildren, with the same feelings of excitement and wonder as we felt on their first day of Kindergarten in 2012.

We wish them luck.