As part of our School Captain duties, we visited Parliament House for a leadership workshop. We were introduced to NSW local government members and met several other Year 12 School Captains and Prefects from high schools right across Sydney, such as other IB schools like St. Paul's Grammar School and Newington College, private schools like The Kings School and Emmanuel College, and state schools such as Barrenjoey High School and Newtown Performing Arts High School. After visiting Parliament House, we took a brief walk to the Governor’s House where we met Her Excellency, the Honourable Margaret Beasley AC QC and toured Government House while chatting with some of the student leaders from the schools attending.

We learnt that student leadership in other IB schools was pretty similar to ours but overall, all these different schools from across Sydney had different school cultures and traditions and some, had very different approaches to student leadership and learning. We noticed for example, that some schools have quite a top-down approach to their student leadership structure, with one school having a complex hierarchy of symbolic military-style ceremonial uniforms, with colours and badges and shoulder epilates indicating their rank. Their captains shared with us, that one issue faced by their student leadership team this year was where to move their early morning military-style parade routines, complete with marching and complex gun movements, out of sight of their worried neighbours while we shared how one of our main issues this year with regards our neighbours, was where to put our school chickens so their early morning crowing didn't disturb the peace.

SRC Captains attend NSW Parliament and visit Government House

Some schools get uniform checked every morning and their shoes have to be polished, and the boys have to be clean-shaven, and they have rankings of their student leaders who all wear badges to show their title and position. We were the only school in attendance that didn't have a uniform and The Official Secretary, Mr Michael Miller, was curious about which school we were representing and once he learnt we were from the German International School, he started speaking with us in German and we had a really interesting conversation about travelling in Germany and he told us how, many years ago, he tried to visit East Berlin before the liberation but wasn't able to get in. He asked us about our university plans for our future studies and then he asked some of the other student leaders if they were learning languages at school to develop their bi-lingual or multi-lingual language skills but aside from The King's School who offer Mandarin, the students in our group said they didn't have the opportunity to study other languages in any real depth, because languages were not a big focus in their schools.

Overall, the day was very educational, social and interesting. We recommend this workshop for our GISS school leaders in the years to come, as it gave us both an insight into how school leadership systems can be structured and how there are different approaches to democracy. Overall, we learnt that our GISS SRC structure gives us more of an inclusive voice as student leaders, with room to express ourselves. Furthermore, being able to express ourselves in another language in a formal context like the conversation we had with Mr Miller at Government House, is a leadership skill that not all students in Sydney are able to develop as well as we get to do at the GISS.

Nuhaa & Miabella (Year 12)