Our girls’ schools offer some inspiring programs

Schools around Australia are highly innovative — and so are their students.

Picture: Fetch it for a Farmer

There are some inspiring stories from the students who attend our high schools across Australia, and many schools have let us know about the wonderful work of their communities. The Wilderness School in South Australia, for example, told us about its new curriculum, Artemis, which it says will help girls to “find and refine the qualities that are unique to humanity”. This project based learning program is designed to build self-regulation and critical thinking, among other attributes.

Meriden Anglican School for Girls, at Strathfield in NSW, told us about their collaboration with the Wanago Program run by the University of Technology, Sydney. Students from many schools, including Meriden, attend the UTS labs each week for university-level engineering content.

From Western Australia, St Hida’s Anglican School for Girls told us about “mentoring from Millennials” – a reverse mentoring program for school leaders, as well as its work on parenting to help create a “Rites of Passage” program for parents and students.

These are just a handful of the extraordinary programs underway in our education system. But there was one we thought truly showed the quality in the system - the story of Annabelle Kingston, a Year 12 boarder at Loreto Normanhurst in Sydney. Annabelle has a double life: in her spare time she runs a website called Fetch it for a Farmer, designed to help struggling rural families.

Annabelle is from the Riverina and launched the site over the 2019-2020 summer when Australians were battling drought and fires. The website (fetchitforafarmer.weebly.com) sells merchandise and uses the revenue to buy grocery vouchers for struggling families.

She says buying groceries seems like a simple exercise for most people but for those hit by drought, it can be an occasion for dread. Says Annabelle: “We sell hats, stickers and stubby holders to raise money and we buy the vouchers from locally owned supermarkets such as IGA and send them to the families within the community.

“We choose locally owned supermarkets to benefit not only the farmers but also the businesses within the community who struggled through a relentless drought.”