Developing Successful Young People

What does success look like at Newington? It looks like a safe environment, where every boy is valued and included. It is boys who are independent communicators, are collaborate and adept problem solvers.

Success looks like our boys fulfilling their potential. We have a strong focus on developing a holistic education which provides a high quality international education focusing on academic achievement, which is differentiated to meet the needs of the amazing diversity of boys in our school.

Success means providing a values based education where our boys understand that empathy, caring for others, working together and contributing to the communities around us is what makes us happy and successful.  Success means giving our boys a range of opportunities through the PYP inquiry program, sport, the arts and the extra-curricular program to find areas of passion and to develop them.

Through our pastoral and social-emotional program we want to develop confident, resilient boys who are unafraid to follow their passions throughout their lives. We want boys to realise that material possessions are fleeting but service, community and connections with others are the key to a successful life.

What success do parents want for their children? Most parent define success as children who are happy, connected and independent. I say to all the parents that their job is to grow up their children to leave them. Success for them to develop independent, contributing members of society.

Sometimes parents want to shield their children from the hard parts of life, they want their children to be happy and experience an easy life where they are successful in everything they do. But if we manufacture success at every turn, then we are doing our children a disservice.

We want our boys to experience challenge, joy, sorrow, failure and hardship and happiness. The full gamut of what life has in store for all of us. We want our boys to fail. But we make sure our boys realise that failure is not a fullstop but the beginning of a new more interesting sentence, a new more interesting chapter. It is a chance to learn. Failure is an opportunity to learn and we need to experience this to be successful in life.

As parent, we cannot insulate our children from failure, as we cannot insulate them from sorrow, challenge and hardship. Instead we need to embrace failure, challenge and hardship as opportunities to make us better as people for the future.

If a parent’s goal is to raise their children so they are ready to leave them, then they need to scaffold an environment that embraces the difficult parts of life. We want boys who can stand tall in the face of challenges and be courageous, compassionate and caring when interacting with a world that often does not mirror these qualities. That is success.

Ben Barrington-Higgs