On Tuesday 16 March, the Student Voice Induction assembly took place where our Captains and Student Voice members were inducted. Below is the speech given by our 2021 School Captain, Sudarshan Kabbinahittalu.

Good morning and a warm welcome to all students and teachers present here today. At this assembly, we will introduce you to the members of your student voice across years 8 to 12. It is a great honour to be able to represent the Woodville High School student body for the 2021 academic year. We as your student leaders and captains will be your voice as we implement new initiatives and engage in the development and improvement of our school, alongside Mrs Mirasgentis, the staff and the school community. In particular, we as captains want us all, as a community, to be a great example and set the standard for future generations at Woodville High of how exceptional we areunited as one.

One of our first actions is to develop our student leadership charter.  The charter is to envision what we want to accomplish as student leaders in both initiatives and service. We want to be able to recognise our objectives based on our school vision and take strategic action on what we can improve on.  The student voice plays an important role by strengthening all students’ views by being the voice of the student body and ensuring our opinions and concerns are heard.  We do this by contributing to school decisions and influencing change. As your leaders, we want to represent you in our school and community.  The aim of our focus will be on student wellbeing, encouraging student participation, and engaging in developing a strong learning culture in our school.

The result of recent student voice meetings have identified our focus of:

Building strong interpersonal relationships between students, teachers and the Woodville High School community. We see this as a step in the right direction that leads to an inclusive and collaborative culture which focuses on driving future direction. A strong community fostering trust and respect for one another will help us to enhance personal effectiveness, adaptability and resilience for everyone as individuals, which in turn, helps strengthen our school values. By establishing a vision for our school’s student leadership, we want to strive to achieve nothing but the best for our school community. To lay a foundation to achieve greatness, and to be able to flourish as a school for years to come. Recently an initiative was taken by addressing the sock issue which the student body felt so strongly on. Following student voice’s recommendation to the Principal and Governing Council we were asked to conduct a survey on your opinions as students on the specific options of what you would like to wear as part of your school uniform. We were most happy that 600 of you fed back your opinion and this was a balance of students from all year levels. The choices were:

  • Plain white
  • Plain black
  • Or either plain white or plain black. 

85% of you the vast majority voted for the option to wear either plain white or plain black socks. The results were then taken back to our Principal and Governing Council who approved the student body decision of plain white or plain black socks. And as of today, it’s your choice as to whether you would like to wear black or white socks. Later on in the year there will be a full review of the uniform by the uniform committee headed by Mr Bracci, and Ms Hutton, consisting of representatives from staff, student voice, and the Governing Council.  At each stage of the review, the committee will be looking for the broader student opinion.

Sudarshan Kabbinahittalu,
Woodville High School Captain