What an extraordinary privilege it was for our Year 5 and 6 girls to travel to Saint Peter's College yesterday to hear from Katherine Bennell-Pegg, Australia's first qualified astronaut and the first woman to be trained as an astronaut under the Australian flag. Ms Bennell-Pegg graduated from the European Space Agency's rigorous astronaut training program in 2024, having been selected from a field of more than 22,500 applicants, and was named 2026 Australian of the Year for her work inspiring the next generation into space and STEM careers.
She spoke candidly with the students about the long and often difficult road that led her to this point: the years of study in engineering and physics, the physical and psychological demands of astronaut training, and the setbacks she had to work through along the way. What stood out most for our girls was not the glamour of spaceflight, but the discipline behind it; the years of preparation, the willingness to keep learning and the resilience required to keep going when things got hard.
Our girls left the session buzzing with ideas, questions and, I suspect, a few new career aspirations. It was a timely reminder that the habits we value and strive to build in Junior School - curiosity, persistence, and the courage to attempt hard things - are the very same qualities that carried Ms Bennell-Pegg into astronaut training and, ultimately, history. We are so grateful to Saint Peter's College for hosting this inspiring event and giving our students the chance to hear from such a remarkable role model.
You may have noticed a renewed and deliberate focus in the Junior School this term on our uniform, manners and the routines that shape how our girls move through the school day. This initiative has been driven by our Acting Principal, Brad Snell, who has asked every area of the school to sharpen its focus on these fundamentals, and we in the Junior School have embraced it wholeheartedly. This is not simply about tidiness or tradition for its own sake. It is grounded in something we know works, both from experience and from research into how children learn.
Cognitive load theory tells us that working memory, the mental space we use to think, reason and learn, is limited. When children have to spend that mental energy working out where to line up, what to do when a lesson ends, or how to greet a visitor, there is less capacity left over for the actual business of learning. Predictable routines free up that thinking space. When a child already knows how the day works, their mind is not cluttered with logistics and they can direct their full attention to what matters: the learning, the connection, being present in the moment in front of them.
Researchers describe this as reducing "extraneous load", the mental effort spent on things that are not part of the learning itself, so that more capacity is available for genuine engagement and growth. Clear, consistent expectations around uniform, manners and movement around the school work in exactly this way. They are not restrictions, they are scaffolding. A well-known routine, practised until it becomes automatic, lets a child walk into a classroom, an assembly or a new situation already knowing what is expected, so their energy goes into thinking, connecting and being curious rather than second-guessing.
There is a second, equally important reason we hold these standards high. Predictable, consistent expectations build a shared culture, one where every girl knows she will be treated with courtesy, where kindness is the norm rather than the exception and where success is something the whole community works towards together. Manners and routines are, in this sense, an expression of care: for ourselves, for each other and for the adults who guide us.
We know our girls thrive within clear, warm boundaries and we are proud of how they have responded to this renewed focus. You may well hear your daughter come home talking about a teacher holding a firm line on something; a routine followed a little more precisely, an expectation repeated a little more insistently than she is used to. If so, please know this is not incidental to one classroom or one teacher. It is a deliberate, school-wide focus that every member of our Junior School and indeed our whole, staff is consistently applying. That consistency is exactly what makes it effective: the more predictable and unified these boundaries are across the school, the more quickly they become second nature for our girls and the more mental and emotional space is freed up for learning, friendships and fun.
Thank you, as always, for the way you reinforce these standards at home. It makes a genuine difference to what we can achieve together at school.
