Briony Scott: The surprising sex talk Sydney’s most respected principal gives her students

Dr Briony Scott will soon end a 14-year stint as principal of Wenona, one of Sydney’s best-known private schools for girls. I spoke to her on Thursday.

Fitz: Thanks so much for your time and trust, Briony.

BS: A pleasure, but can you tell me the point of why you want to talk to me?

Briony Scott: “I’m not sure that now is the time for many people to be retiring, chilling out or disengaging.”Credit: Louise Kennerley

Fitz: You are a famous educator in Sydney, who has played a part in raising 10,000 or so young people. And what I really want to try and capture, frankly – after also trying to work out why you’re suddenly leaving Wenona at the height of your powers – is your wisdom in educating and raising young ’uns.

BS [laughing]: That’s kind. I am not sure I can live up to what you’ve just said, but go on.

Fitz: So … “goodbye, Mrs Chips”. How are you feeling as you approach the end of a glorious 40-year career in education?

BS: Well, it’s not quite 40 years, and I’m not sure that I’m wrapping up. What I have done is to resign from my current job where I’ve been for nearly 14 years, after being at my previous school for nearly five years. Obviously, I’ve worked in other schools, too. And when I look and listen to the way things are evolving around the world and the way we speak to each other, I’m not sure that now is the time for many people to be retiring, chilling out or disengaging.

Fitz: Do you mean that in the age of Trump, we need all hands on the pump?

BS: No. We can’t blame it on one person. But yes, right now we need all adults on deck, the ones who aren’t going to swing punches either physically or metaphorically, the ones who are able to engage in complexity and talk without getting flamboyant and demonstrative and just rude, you know? It’s a time for all the adults in the room to go: actually, this is how we’re going to talk to each other, this is how we’re going to move forward. And so I’m not sure that now is the time for people to step back from that.

Fitz: Is any part of your departure to do with your recent bout of severe ill health, from which you have mercifully recovered, but in the sense of a reminder of “so little time, so many OTHER things to do”?

BS: No. That “recent” bout was back in 2015, nearly 10 years ago. And I am in cracking good health.

Fitz: All right. But still, from everything I hear, you’re at the absolute height of your powers at Wenona, and have never been more highly regarded. The fact you want to stay engaged is wonderful, but why leave Wenona?

BS [long pause]: It’s a really good question ... I don’t regret the decision, so there’s not a part of me that’s going, “oh gosh, I wish I hadn’t”, but it’s very difficult for me to articulate. But I’ve just turned 61, and while on the one hand I’m ready for a rest, on the other hand, as my children are all grown, I feel more free and ready to hit something new than I ever have.

Fitz: So, can you settle the rumours for me? In the eastern suburbs they used to say you’re going to be the principal of [soon to be co-ed Bellevue Hill private school] Cranbrook, but that position is now filled. On the north shore they still say you’re going to [North Sydney boys private school] Shore.

BS: Neither were ever true.

Fitz: So what will you do?

BS: I don’t know. Go somewhere where there is the greatest need? I think one of the challenges in education is that when you’re in it, you are 100 per cent saturated by what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. And when you have big schools, with 1300 students, 2600 parents and hundreds of staff, your world becomes saturated in the lives of other people. And so it’s not an easy thing to extricate yourself from and go, “OK, where to next?” So my thought is, “Let me just stop, recalibrate, and then go again.”

Fitz: OK, so to the nub of it. What do you see in 2024 as the greatest challenges in being a teenage girl?

BS: One of the biggest challenges is that people are so quick to pathologise adolescence for them …

Fitz: In what sense, “pathologise”?

BS: In the sense that we can never let a child just be sad; they’re “depressed”. They can never just be worried; they have “anxiety”. There is a fear when a girl goes through a very normal and healthy range of emotions. We are so quick to move in when, in fact, part of life is that it actually sucks, right? Tough things happen, and the key thing all young ones need is to learn how to be able to grapple with them. With this tendency to assume that girls are all struggling with daily life, we can miss or overlook a child who is genuinely struggling and out of their depth.

Fitz: Go on.

BS: There’s the old story about the caterpillar struggling to get out of a cocoon, and your instinct is to want to help it out, so you cut open the cocoon. But now the butterfly that was inside can’t fly because the way it was strengthening its wings was by pushing against the cocoon and being able to build up that strength. We want our young people to have the strength to fly. Our job is not to make people happy, and our job is not to entertain children. When a young one is upset or hurt, it is not automatically a reason for 10 adults to come rushing in. The first job is to walk alongside them and help strengthen them so that they can deal with whatever life throws their way.

There’s this beautiful Ram Dass quote that just goes, “We’re all just walking each other home.” It’s a good reminder that it’s not our job to solve everyone’s problems. And, in fact, most of us can’t solve each other’s problems, it’s just about bearing witness to what is going on in other people’s lives, about being there.

Fitz: This is precisely the top-shelf wisdom I was looking for. I know you believe that much the same principles apply to boys as to girls.

BS: Yes, but what stirs me in the education of boys is this sense of having low expectations around behaviour because, well, “boys will be boys”. But it is also acting as if just being a boy is enough of a defining feature. You know what? All the men in my life that I know and love and respect so much are so different from each other. They are not these clones. But I look at the pressure on young men now, around how they are expected to be, or how people think they should behave. I look at the stuff like the Andrew Tate message of macho culture and the right, and even desirability, to treat women badly, that is absolutely rife. Parents need to understand that someone is in the ears of our children and raising them, and if it’s not us then who is it? Because you can’t just be there, doing life in parallel with your teenage child, expecting that they’re somehow going to pick up what’s going on. You’ve got to be there, openly talking with them, investing in them, because if you’re not, other people are.

Fitz: And yet I know you are also very strong that when there is a real problem, parents have to move fast and hard and get help.

BS: Yes. And my heart breaks for them. The main thing is to know they are not alone and to get professional help. The challenge is that every kid is so different, and every family is so different. So your child may not automatically gel with the first person you reach out to. And in that case I would say, reach out again, to a different person. Reach out. Always, get help.

Fitz: The big debate right now is about more and more schools, both private and public, going co-ed, with the NSW government announcing just this week that four single-sex public schools will be doing exactly that, starting in 2026.

BS: I don’t know of the reason behind these decisions. I have no idea if it’s a good thing or not. I love co-ed schools and have taught in them, just as I love and have taught in boys’ schools, too. But going co-ed will not change anything if you do not have leaders and teachers and adults and parents going, “This is how we behave”. They must be run by people who understand the pressures that young people are under, both within their gender and between the genders, and, if they don’t, neither being co-ed nor single sex is going to save you. For you can have a sexist single-sex school, and you can have a sexist co-ed school. In terms of turning out great adults, far more important than the genders of who is being taught is what they are being taught and by whom. And for me it is important to note that the difference within each gender is far greater than the difference between them. But it’s not the role of girls to socialise boys, and it’s not the role of women to socialise men.

Fitz: Another issue du jour that has really only shown up in education in relatively recent times is transgenderism. Does Wenona have any transgender students?

BS: I wouldn’t tell you, but if we did, they would be more than welcome. And so would transgender staff. People are people.

Fitz: Of the many conversations you and I have had, one of the ones that has most fascinated me is your end-of-year chat to year 12 Wenona students, where you talk to them about such things as sex, and have a frank chat about what they might be facing.

BS: Yes, it’s part of a subject called Renaissance Studies, and it’s all about life beyond school, and there are no assessments in it. At the end I do talk openly, and it takes them about 30 seconds to recover from the fact that the principal’s talking about all of this sort of stuff. But it’s important. I talk to them about things like all the forms of contraception; what to do if you’re ever assaulted; where you would go, who you would talk to, how to get on the electoral roll, and how do you order your Medicare card – the practicalities of everything. But because we are in the age of porn, I also talk to them about unreal expectations they might face as to what is normal, what is expected of them. And I provide a counterpoint. Many young women and young men find themselves in positions where they are so incredibly uncomfortable engaging in various acts that they think they’re the problem because they don’t want to do it, or that they’re not ready for it, right? Everyone goes, “Yeah, this is normal”. Like giving oral sex is a really normal expectation, right? And if that gives you joy, then great. But if they don’t hear a counterpoint to the argument that “everyone does it, so you must do it, too”, a non-judgmental counterpoint, then how on earth are they meant to steer? So ask yourselves, is this actually what you want? Or are you doing it because you’re afraid that if you don’t do it, there’s something wrong with you? So I’m very happy to talk about it.

Fitz: Thanks so much. You should do a book on the distilled wisdom of Dr Briony Scott. But what do you think you’ll be doing a year from now?

BS: I honestly don’t know. I feel like I have leapt off a cliff. I waited and waited to see what would be next, thinking the clouds would clear and something would emerge, but nothing ever did. So I leapt, and all I can hear right now is the sound of the wind whistling in my ears!

Fitz: Listen more closely. That’s whistling and cheers.

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