Esperance Senior High School has a proud history of student success across many, many spheres of achievement. We continually explore ways our students can flourish at school, and how we can nurture our students’ capacity to be ready for their futures beyond school.
At Esperance Senior High School, we celebrate and nurture our students’ successes every day.
We acknowledge students who contribute to the strong ESHS school culture with their kindness, respect, emotional intelligence, and support of others.
We recognise students whose work ethic, learner agency, dedication and determination results in their achievement of excellence in whichever pathway they choose.
We celebrate students whose resilience and persistence to learn and grow — especially from the things that don’t go so well — means they are making great improvement and setting themselves up for success into the future.
We value students who demonstrate leadership and the ability to communicate effectively with others, to make our school better.
We nurture our students’ critical thinking, creative thinking and problem-solving, and their keenness to engage in thinking and action to improve their community and the world we live in.
And so to me, success isn’t a destination; rather it’s a journey of growth and improvement -investing in our own learning to become the best version of ourselves.
A new initiative for 2026, to broaden the way our students understand ways they can be successful, is our STRIVE program, which aims to strengthen learner agency, and develop capabilities for lifelong learning.
STRIVE starts with self-awareness and self-reflection. All of our Year 7 and Year 8 students have started the year by learning about and reflecting on their Learner Agency. Every student has set goals on how they can be more active in their own learning journey; for example, how they can develop their belief in their own ability (self-efficacy), or positively influence others, or develop their growth mindset, or be more motivated, or set higher goals, or take greater responsibility for their own learning.
Currently, our students are exploring Emotional Intelligence, reflecting on and setting improvement goals to develop their self-awareness and self-management, and learning about ways to develop their capacity and ability to understand and interact effectively with others.
Recently, Esperance SHS was invited to present this innovative approach at the Entrepreneurial Educators conference in Sydney. Phil Reading (Coordinator of Quality Teaching) and I addressed educators and industry members from across Australia on this practical and achievable approach to teaching these essential ‘Capabilities for Learning and Life’. An organiser of the conference said, “It is so impressive to see such important and complex work… and a great deal of research… distilled into something so simple and achievable for all students.”
I was also privileged this week to discuss with our Esperance Rotarians some of the clear synergies between our approach to nurturing future-ready learners, and the incredible knowledge and expertise of Rotarians and many other community members. I am excited about the terrific opportunities we have as a school, to work with the wonderful and supportive members of our Esperance Community.
Janet Silburn Barker
Principal
