From the Upper School

A message from Mr Riley, Head of Upper School

It has been another busy and exciting week in the Upper School, with our Year 10s buzzing about their upcoming Urban Challenge in Week 4 and many students interviewing for coveted exchange positions on offer this year. On Monday, Paul from the Urban Challenge addressed our Year 10s explaining the day program (see here for more information) before the girls had the opportunity to plan their themes and assign leadership roles for the day. We look forward to sharing a few pictures and videos next week! For exchange, we are so pleased to be offering places at 12 amazing schools across the globe (including Scotland, Italy, Canada, Argentina, South Africa, America, and Spain) after years of Covid interruptions to this fabulous program.

It has been exciting to hear about the adventurers of our first Residential Program cohort out at Vision Valley, who have just returned from their first expedition to Bouddi National Park, and to prepare for the departure of our 1B group who are now less than a month away!

We very much look forward to welcoming our Upper School families to campus on Monday 27 February for our Wellbeing Information Night. We have listened to community feedback from 2022 in holding the night later in the evening this year, addressing Year 9 and 10 separately, holding it on a Monday night to accommodate our wonderful Boarding families and having a more structured opportunity for you to get to know your daughter’s Compass Teacher. We look forward to circulating the invite shortly and hopefully seeing you there.

In closing, I would like to draw your attention to a topic widely circulating in the media: Chat GPT. If you have not explored this amazing tool, I encourage you to look at this or this article and/or talk to your daughter. I was extremely fortunate to hear from our amazing Director of Innovative Technologies, Mr. Anthony England, about it last week and left absolutely gobsmacked! For schools, this new tool will have a lot of implications but for the moment, I hope you too can share in the sense of wonder as we gaze into the power of the future.

Key Dates

Thursday 16 February – Residential Program 1A Parent Event

Monday 20 February – Urban Challenge for Year 10

Tuesday 21 February – Senior School Cross Country

Friday 24 February – Pymble Icebreaker

Tom Riley

Head of Upper School