Over 700 students from across Western Australia made their way to the GRIP Leadership Conference at the Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre yesterday.  The conference brought together young leaders from all sectors of education, to network, share ideas and develop their leadership skills. The sixteen Year 10 Students Leaders who attended the day enjoyed the learning opportunity and immersed themselves in leadership good practice with a focus on responsibility. Students were in for more than just acquiring new skills, there was much laughter, inspiration and collaboration.

The day began with us learning how to make sound plans and how to achieve success as a team.  An interesting lesson of the morning was the call to servant leadership, significant for Santa Maria College in our Year of Service. This was followed by a lovely morning tea break overlooking the hustle and bustle of Elizabeth Quay.

Following our break, we entered into discussions on how we can develop creative ways to target needs in our school community and experiment with methods to overcome challenges as leaders.

The lunch break was a wonderful opportunity to explore some of the ideas generated from the sessions leading up to lunch.  Key Workshop sessions focused on ‘The Compass of a Leadership Team’, ‘The 4 Expectations of Responsibility’, ‘Generating Ideas that are Outside of the Box’ and ‘Overcoming the Challenge of Leadership’.

The day concluded with a session about how to gain support from our peers as we endeavour to turn great ideas into action. Woven into the day were many fun sessions inviting us to make some ‘loud noise’, play people bingo, enjoy team building activities and interact with the huge variety of students from schools all over WA.  We collected an impressive amount of knowledge on how we can be the most effective student leaders possible and came back to school with many resources. On leaving the Convention Centre, our bus ride home was abuzz, each student leader was brimming with innovative and exciting new ideas, the conference had motivated us to dream up and implement.  We look forward to a very active and productive year ahead.

Bridget Davis (Year 10, Corbett)