Good Humans, Ready for the World
It has been a wet fortnight on the Gold Coast. The kind that makes you grateful for an All Saints umbrella and gumboots.
I want to begin by acknowledging the memorial service for Reverend Canon Len Nairn OAM held last weekend. It was a beautiful occasion and a true reflection of the man. Thank you to everyone who sent messages or attended in person. Our love continues to go out to the extended Nairn family.
The highlight of the week came on the cross country track, where our students delivered something special. All Saints won both the APS Championship junior and secondary school cross country titles! Congratulations to our coaches and runners. For our Junior School, it was the 30th consecutive championship win, a remarkable streak of sustained success. It was also a fitting farewell moment for our outgoing Director of Sport, Mr Fergus Leslie, who finishes in the role today after 16 years as Director and more than 30 years at All Saints, having joined us in April 1995. Thirty years of service to a school community is a rare and significant thing. It means generations of students, families and colleagues whose lives have been shaped by your presence, often in ways they may not fully appreciate until much later. Thank you from all of us, Mr Leslie.
This week we welcomed Kirra Pendergast to All Saints. Kirra is one of Australia's most respected voices on online safety, working with governments, schools and organisations across the globe. She described the digital economies that big tech has constructed around human vulnerability. The comparison economy, built on the gap between who you are and who everyone else appears to be. The outrage economy, in which anger and reaction are the fuel that keeps attention locked in place. The algorithm learns fast. Feed it a reaction and it will return more of the same, and more relentlessly, every time.
What Kirra offered was not alarm but understanding. Awareness of how these systems work is genuinely powerful. Couple that with a young person who has real self-esteem, a settled sense of who they are and a different kind of confidence emerges. They can see the pull for what it is and make informed, mature decisions rather than simply being carried along. That is the combination we are working toward.
This sits at the heart of our second Blueprint pillar, Good Humans Ready for the World. What does it mean to be a good human? And what will genuinely set our young people apart? I think these are the same question. Warmth, humour, the ability to communicate with real feeling, to read a room, to make someone feel genuinely seen. These are the qualities no algorithm can replicate and in a world increasingly shaped by AI, they are becoming more valuable, not less.
Here at school, we speak to these qualities deliberately and consistently, in assemblies and in classroom conversations. We ask that these be reinforced at home. Our values of Truth, Faith and Compassion are not decorative. They are the language we use to name what good character looks like, and we return to them because repetition is how values become habits and habits become who you are.
Tech literacy is part of this picture and we take it seriously. But we are also increasingly discerning about ensuring the technologies we choose are genuinely serving learning, in the classroom and in the work we set at home.
If your children were part of Kirra's sessions this week, ask them what stayed with them. It is a conversation worth having around the dinner table and one I hope continues well beyond the school gate.
Have a wonderful weekend.
Matt Corbett
Principal
