The return of our staff and students to school this week has breathed life back into Dunstan High School and I am both excited and relieved that we are back together.

Students have had a range of different experiences over the last 7 weeks; some have enjoyed the time, some have not. While my overwhelming impression has been that the students are also excited to be back, we have been careful to ease them back into their learning and have been even more sensitive than normal to how they are responding after such a long time away.

A huge thank you goes out to all our staff and parents for the support given to our students.

It has not always been easy (surprisingly, ‘easy’ is not always a term associated with teenagers), however, there has been some really good learning come out of this experience and I am heartened by the ability of our students to work independently. The trick will be to take these learnings forward with us to further enhance what we do here at Dunstan.

Finally, I want to acknowledge that we have a lot of events/activities that have been impacted. This has included school sport, choir, the Formal and camps. We are taking the position that it is beneficial to look at gradually re-introducing our extra-curricular programme which we know is a really important part of school life. I hope you can be patient with us as we look to do this; some of our events may look different, some of our events may not happen this year, nothing is ‘off the table’ at this stage.

I hope you all have an enjoyable weekend.