The 'best ever' staff conference: honouring our past, embracing our future

‘Honouring our past, embracing our future’ is the theme for our centenary year and was the focus of our recent staff education conference. The conference was an opportunity for all staff to come together to celebrate 100 years of learning at Carey.

The conference was enormously successful, providing:

• a chance to be inspired and challenged by some fresh ideas and thinking from beyond our school
• an invitation to co-create our future
• an opportunity to hear from those prototyping and developing our solutions for the future
• a time to share stories of who we are at Carey and what we want to become.

Mitch Tambo, proud Gamilaraay man and one of Australia’s most talented performers, opened the conference with renditions of ‘You’re the Voice’ and ‘Great Southern Land’ featuring Reigan, the classic Australian songs rewritten in Mitch’s language of Gamilaraay.

Shelley Ware, proud Yankunytjatjara woman and media personality was our emcee and presented on self-education and self-awareness.

David Price OBE, international advisor and acclaimed author delivered the Carey Centenary Oration. David took us on the journey through the many social, educational and technological changes since 1923 and brilliantly summed up by saying:

‘We’ve had over 100 years of preparing young people to be farmhands or factory slaves. There was neither the interest nor time to allow them to become good humans. With the arrival of AI, which offers the possibility of supercharged productivity for a fraction of the human oversight, it would be a great catastrophic mistake not to seize upon the opportunity to enable our students to spend more time caring for their fellow humans: to understand what it means to live a life well-lived: and to work with the new machines to help solve some of the global challenges – which couldn’t have been imagined when Carey opened its doors for the first time.’

Other presenters included Sophie Renton, trend analyst from McCrindle, who gave us a deep dive into social and educational trends; Jon Yeo, Carey alum (1990) and professional speaking coach, who discussed what we can learn from speaking and influence; and business storyteller Yamini Naidu who shared with us the power of storytelling.

All staff worked with Kynan Robinson, Carey alum (1989) and CEO of EnRusk, over the two days to progress our thinking about the education we offer and give staff an opportunity to co-create our future.

One highlight was the inclusion of student voice with the involvement of Mercy, a current Year 12 student, who along with recent alum Lucy Jepson (2014) provided an important and current perspective for staff on a panel discussion about the future of education, also involving David Price, Kynan Robinson and Jonathan Walter (pictured).

We also heard from Carey Archivist, Helen Wolff, who launched the new online Carey Collections. This is a digital archives collection of about 3000 items which is available to the Carey community and provides an exciting opportunity to look deeper into Carey’s history.

Staff feedback from the conference has been overwhelmingly positive, many claiming it was the ‘best ever’.

Kate Croft
Deputy Principal – Learning