The events of the last two years have put leaders from all industries under the spotlight, providing plenty of examples of both poor and best practice for the world to analyse.

While a global pandemic is an extraordinary event, crises and situations of extreme stress and pressure generally do reveal a lot about a person’s capacity for leadership. Leaders and organisations that have responded well are those that have stayed true to their values and mission and used these as a compass when the landscape continued to shift and change.

Something we’ve been hearing for a long time but which the pandemic really brought home is that to be resilient and successful, contemporary organisations must be agile — able to reassess, to adapt plans and to regularly experiment with ideas. To achieve this, we must embrace change and not be beholden to old ways of doing things. Being rigid about plans made doesn’t always work or best serve the organisation.

Just as this was the case for businesses, it has also been the case for schools. There came a realisation that not only was the old way of teaching unable to deliver the best possible outcomes when it came to student wellbeing, relationships, and the provision of quality of learning, it had simply become unviable.

I am proud that St Margaret’s College continues to be a learning organisation that adapts to change, especially in these challenging times. Instead of cancelling events, our staff are looking for creative solutions and then being brave enough to give them a go. Hosting our recent Senior School parent-teacher interviews remotely, developing a plan to film and stream our upcoming dual-cast production of Annie Jr while continuing to give our girls the experience of performing to a live audience within their bubble, and developing a suite of video content to help orientate our incoming Year 9 families, are recent examples where we have stayed true to our values and mission, despite the uncertain landscape. As our Term 4 programme continues to evolve, do please continue to check in with this fortnightly newsletter, and specific communications from your daughters’ teachers.

Leadership is one of the key qualities we aim to instil in our girls. We might feel that the pandemic is testing our limits, but at the same time, it is helping to develop our resilience, empathy, and our ability to sit with uncertainty. These are all important attributes for our girls to develop in preparation for their lives beyond the school gates, at which point we hope Covid is but a distant memory.