Last Friday at Assembly we acknowledged the efforts and achievements of all Academic Excellence and Academic Merit award recipients from Semester 2, 2021 and from Semester 1 this year. It was pleasing to have over 130 names displayed across the screens and read out by Mr Watkins and Ms Wegener. To each award recipient, congratulations! To any student who achieved a personal best and/or improvement from their previous academic report, irrespective of whether you qualified for one of the awards, I equally congratulate your efforts.

Our Year 12 cohort of students has a relatively short time remaining at the College before graduating. It probably feels like a long way away given the assessment workload and preparation at present, but time will pass quickly. To maximise my time in which to learn from them, I am currently inviting groups of approximately eight Year 12 students to have lunch with me each day. While not compulsory, it is pleasing to see most taking up the offer over the first two weeks of term. The lunch is an opportunity to get to know them better as I do not teach them this year, but most importantly, it is a chance for students to provide valuable feedback to the College about their collective experiences over their time spent here. I am quickly gaining a profile of the ideal teacher, in terms of attributes that assist students to learn, and what they would change about the College if they could. I have been blown away by their openness and desire to help make Concordia an even better school than it is now. They are solution focused.

The second round of Learning Conversations for the year are scheduled to take place on Tuesday 16 August in person, and Thursday 25 August via Microsoft Teams. Offering an afternoon/evening of each format is in direct response to the feedback received from parents in the recent school-wide survey conducted by MMG Education. We hope this flexibility will maximise your opportunity to speak with your child’s teachers about the progress of your child’s learning.

Finally, I would like to encourage parents of Year 9-12 students to consider attending the short Parents' and Caregivers' Canapes and Conversation events to be held in coming weeks. The Year 7-8 event held late last term was a wonderful event. I hope to meet you there.

Dennis Mulherin
Principal - Middle and Senior School