Dear St Hilda’s Community
My name is Trish Jakovich, and I’m the Director of Junior School. I’ve been with St Hilda’s for 17 years and had the privilege of leading the Junior School for the last two and a half years. One of my favourite days of the year is welcoming our Year 12s who attended Junior School back to campus to connect with their younger peers and for our teachers to see the confident young women they have become.
Sigmund Freud along with other theorists have emphasised the importance of ensuring humans in their first five years of life are exposed to a well-rounded, loving and stimulating environment as a means to ensuring a positive future.
While we know that humans continue to learn, and their personality can be shaped in later years, it is a blessing to be able to have an impact from the very start of a child’s schooling.
Together with my exceptional team, we are dedicated to ensuring that the early foundations of a student’s learning and development are not only formally laid down but interlocked in a way that supports the development of the whole child cognitively, physically, socially and emotionally.
Investing in the early stages of a person’s education not only provides the underpinning for future learning but also fosters the opportunity for individuals to reach their potential. Providing an education that is suited to the learning needs and interests of females enriches the learning experiences and harvests the skills and knowledge she needs to continue to rise from her current level of personal best to the next.
I will always remember a conversation I had with a couple of educators who came to teach our girls after being in a co-educational and all boys school. They were amazed by the level of dedication, organisation and focus our girls brought to their learning. They were astounded to find that what would normally take their past students a whole period to get done took our girls half the time.
This gives our educators the opportunity to build additional layers of learning into the day, providing our Junior School graduates with an edge that they will take with them throughout their lives.
Investing in our children through their early years of education paves the way for them to be strong, well-educated, adaptable and ongoing learners as adults. They are equipped to take on the world and map new roads for their own and others’ futures.
St Hilda’s Junior School may be comprised of many little people, and we can get blinded by their “cuteness”, but they are our future leaders and society shapers. So let’s celebrate their achievements and those of their educators.
Thank you for investing in the young and our future.
Trish Jakovich
Director of Junior School
