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The events of the last year have put leaders from all industries under the spotlight, providing plenty of examples of both poor and best practice for the world to analyse. And while a global pandemic is an extraordinary event, crises and situations of extreme stress and pressure generally do reveal a lot about a person’s capacity for leadership. Leaders and organisations that have responded well are those that have stayed true to their values and mission and used these as a compass when the landscape continued to shift and change.

Prep, and years 4, 7 and 9 are developmental ‘leap’ years for kids, writes Marise McConaghy. She provides tips for parents to support their children during these formative stages.

Teenage girls attending single-sex schools have coped better than most throughout the pandemic, with a national survey ­revealing above-average levels of life satisfaction, happiness and confidence in the future.

This year, Strathcona will expand independent learning for the senior school, giving girls the chance to use extra time for activities including study groups, meetings with teachers and extra tutorials.

Principal, Mrs Marise McConaghy reflects on remote learning in CIO Magazine. 2020 was a year of fast learning, adaptability and a myriad new skills development. “…students have learnt to use a wide range of new technologies and tools in the remote learning context, and in the process they’ve developed new skills and have been able to exert greater autonomy over their learning” and teachers have had the opportunity to rethink and reframe their role from “…less as ‘knowledge delivery systems’ and more as mentors, guides and collaborators.” Read more about the transformation of 2020.

Deciding whether or not to send your child to early learning is one of a parent’s most important considerations, especially at this time of the year.

If you’re still on the fence about it, that’s ok, many parents are. After all, it’s a very personal decision and one that doesn’t have a right or wrong answer.

The events of this year have taught us many lessons — perhaps the most significant one being that our students have remarkable resilience and aptitude for new ways of learning. We underestimated students’ desire and capacity to be self-organised, self-motivated and independent, and although we suspected this in many of them, the pandemic has forced us to move away from traditional structures and given students a chance to prove themselves extremely capable in charting their own paths.