VCE Awards Assembly: Thursday 19 February

Our annual VCE Awards Assembly held this week was a wonderful opportunity to celebrate the class of 2025 and their many achievements. We were pleased to welcome back those students who had achieved notable success in their VCE and VCE VM classrooms. In all circumstances, their accomplishments were attributable to their hard work, their willingness to share their talents, and their particular embodiment of the Mercy Values of courage and hospitality.

In their time at Sacred Heart, each of the students celebrated at the VCE Awards Assembly had demonstrated the courage to fail. The courage to make mistakes. The courage to be uncertain, but to try anyway. The courage to acknowledge an error, and to seek feedback and support to correct it. The bedrock of their achievements was not found in all the questions they answered correctly, but in their consistent preparedness to get an answer wrong, and then to find out why.

Similarly, each of them had consistently shown great hospitality to their own inner voice. In their time at school, they had made a welcoming space for the voice of aspiration, the voice of ambition, and the voice of hope. And throughout their years at Sacred Heart, they had drawn on this voice to give them ballast in times of challenge and setback.

We celebrate our high achievers from the Class of 2025, because their accomplishments deserve acclamation and applause. What they have achieved is simply remarkable. We also celebrate each of them, because they offer us a model of what we too might aspire to, if we can also find within ourselves the courage to fail, and embrace the voice that calls us to think boldly about our own capacity for learning and growth.

Making family meeting requests a priority

As our academic year has now begun in earnest, so too have the various structures that support our students as they grow and learn. An important element of the partnership between families and the College is the need, at times, to come together to meet and be in conversation. We ask that families recognise requests from the college to meet as important opportunities to support student learning. Arranging a meeting time within a secondary school setting can have some complexities, and may involve us covering classes or other duties so that key staff can be in attendance. We see the value in changing the arrangement of a teacher’s or leader’s work day in such circumstances, as we recognise that this is in the service of supporting a student’s learning journey. We ask that all families also place priority on requests from the college to meet, with the recognition that this may at times involve rearranging scheduled items at your end as well.

Reminders: Bus allocations

Students who travel to and from Sacred Heart via the school buses are reminded that they must only travel on their allocated bus. No student should attempt to travel on a bus on which they do not have an allocated place. If arrangements are needed to travel to a friend’s house, sports training, or other ad hoc destinations, then this must occur via private transport, not the school buses.