“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”
— John 14:27
Welcome to the start of Term 4. Staff, parents, and students alike have welcomed the excitement of students returning to the campus. We have really hit the ground running this term. On Tuesday last week our Class of 2024 started their HSC exams in good spirits and nervous smiles. I wish them all the best for the next four weeks of assessments.
Congratulations to our incoming Year 12 students who on day 1 this term were involved in their rite of passage Commencement Service. The symbolism of this event is noteworthy and the students and families respected and appreciated the gesture and the event. I wish our incoming Year 12 students all the best as they start their HSC studies as the class of 2025.
The college is in the process of completing our SIP2024 and starting our planning processes for SIP2025. We plan to share this vision with our community in the first newsletter next year. It has been a very positive year with a great deal of academic and co-curricular success in a host of areas. The college has also grown by almost 5% in our enrolments and will again in 2025 when we welcome 80 new kindy students onto the campus.
I wish to thank all our families and partners for supporting the college throughout the year.
The college has completed the enrolment process for 2025, but to avoid potential waiting lists for future years, I encourage families to enrol as soon as possible.
Conversely, I would appreciate it if you could advise the school if you are going to withdraw your child at any stage in Term 4 this year, as we have waiting lists in almost all years. Please note that it is college policy to provide a term’s notice if departing the community.
While studying at Oxford University’s Said Business School earlier this year, I spent an afternoon learning from renowned management and strategic thinking guru Margaret Heffernan. This is one of her stories. It is paraphrased.
An evolutionary biologist named William Muir studied chickens. He was interested in productivity which is easy to measure in chickens because you just count the eggs. He wanted to know what could make his chickens more productive, so he devised an experiment. Chickens live in groups, so first of all, he selected just an average flock, and he left it alone for six generations. Then he created a second group of the individually most productive chickens - you could call them superchooks - and he put them together in a superflock, and each generation, he selected only the most productive for breeding. After six generations had passed, what did he find? The first group, the average group, was doing just fine. They were all plump and fully feathered and egg production had increased dramatically. What about the second group? All but three were dead. They'd pecked the rest to death. The individually productive chickens had achieved their success only by suppressing the productivity of the rest.
We’re always being told that the way we get ahead is to compete: get into the right school, get into the right job, get to the top. Many of us never really felt very motivated by pecking orders or by superchooks or by superstars. But for a long time, we've run most organisations along the superchicken model.
We've thought that success is achieved by picking the superstars, the brightest men and women, in the room, and giving them all the resources and all the power. And the result has too often been just the same as in William Muir's experiment: aggression, dysfunction and waste.
If the only way the most productive can be successful is by suppressing the productivity of the rest, then we badly need to find a better way to work and a richer way to live.
What is it that makes some groups obviously more successful and more productive than others?
A team at MIT brought in hundreds of volunteers, they put them into groups and they gave them very hard problems to solve. What happened was exactly what you'd expect - some groups were very much more successful than others.
What was interesting was that the high-achieving groups were not those where they had one or two people with spectacularly high IQ. Nor were the most successful groups the ones that had the highest aggregate IQ.
The really successful teams had three characteristics. First, they showed high degrees of social sensitivity to each other. Secondly, the successful groups gave roughly equal time to each other, so that no one voice dominated, but neither were there any passengers. Thirdly, the more successful groups had more women in them.
Was this because women typically score more highly on social sensitivity? Or was it because they brought a more diverse perspective? We don’t know, but this experiment showed that some groups do better than others because of their social connectedness to each other.
How does this play out in the real world? It means that what happens between people really counts because ideas can flow and grow in groups that are highly attuned and sensitive to each other. People don't get stuck. They don't waste energy down dead ends.
Helpfulness is absolutely core to successful teams and it routinely outperforms individual intelligence. Helpfulness means I don't have to know everything, I just have to work among people who are good at getting and giving help. What drives helpfulness is people getting to know each other. When the going gets tough, and it always will get tough if you're doing breakthrough work that really matters, what people need is social support, and they need to know who to ask for help.
Organisations don't have ideas; only people do. What motivates people are the bonds and loyalty and trust they develop between each other. What matters is the mortar, not just the bricks. When you put all of this together, you get something called social capital. Social capital is the reliance and interdependency that builds trust. Social capital is what gives organisations momentum and makes them robust.
Teams that work together longer get better, because it takes time to develop the trust you need for real candour and openness. And time is what builds value. This isn't just about chumminess and it's no charter for slackers. That's how good ideas turn into great ideas, because no idea is born fully formed. It emerges a little bit as a child is born, kind of messy and confused, but full of possibilities. And it's only through generous contribution, faith and challenge that they achieve their potential.
How much more could we give each other if we stopped trying to be superchickens.
Once you truly appreciate how social work is, many things have to change. Management by talent contests has routinely pitted employees against each other. Now, rivalry has to be replaced by social capital. For decades, we've tried to motivate people extrinsically, even though we've got a vast amount of research that shows that this erodes social connectedness.
We need to let people motivate each other. For years, we've thought that leaders were heroic soloists who were expected to solve complex problems alone. Now, we need to redefine leadership as an activity in which conditions are created for everyone to do their most courageous thinking together.
We won't solve our problems if we expect them to be solved by a few supermen or superwomen. We need everybody because it is only then that we will liberate the energy, imagination, and momentum we need to create the best beyond measure.
So, what does this have to do with our school? Good question. The lesson from the superchooks experiment is clear: sustainable success comes not from cultivating a few star performers but from creating an environment where everyone can contribute and thrive. In education, this means:
By embracing these principles, schools can create learning environments that enhance academic performance and prepare students for a world that increasingly values teamwork, empathy, and collective problem-solving.
Applications for 2026 Academic Scholarships for students entering Years 5-12 are now open and will close at midnight AEDST Sunday 2 February 2025. The scholarships are awarded on the basis of a competitive examination conducted by ACER, which will take place on Saturday 22 February 2025 at Bishop Druitt College.
Scholarships are open to current and prospective students.
Full or partial scholarships are awarded by the Principal.
Please see our website for further details: https://www.bdc.nsw.edu.au/join-our-school/academic-scholarships
Please find linked a flyer for our Cathedral's 140th Anniversary Gala Dinner.
Early bird tickets are $150. It is a formal event.
It’s hats off to teachers on Friday 25 October for World Teachers’ Day! Let’s celebrate our teachers and thank them for all their work to inspire, educate and empower learners at BDC. I am so proud of our fantastic teachers.
Nick Johnstone
Principal
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