Head of College

PLUS ULTRA 2025 - OUR NEW STRATEGIC INTENT

TIM KOTZUR

In the 1961 edition of The Review, our College yearbook, there is an article by Theo Helbig (Class of 1962) about what St Peters would be in the year 3961 AD. Theo envisaged St Peters in 3961 AD ‘as the most modern school in Brisbane’. He also believed that St Peters was ‘entirely a boarding school. Day Scholars are just not permitted.’ St Peters, he believed, would have an enrolment of ‘eleven thousand students, comprising almost five thousand girls and over six thousand boys’. Of those eleven thousand ‘a number of students hail from the planets of Mars and Venus’. Interestingly, Theo believed that the total number of teachers would ‘number only fifty-six’ with the rest of the teaching done by robots. Theo writes ‘most of the teachers do themselves admit that the robots do a better job of drumming something into the student’s minds than they can’. A few other interesting things from Theo’s essay about the future of St Peters—‘the ovals are located on tops of buildings...sporting fixtures are played against some other metropolitan schools as well as against teams from other planets’ and ‘the College has its own nuclear power plant’. It will be interesting to see if Theo’s vision for St Peters comes to pass.

Throughout 2019 and 2020 the College, like Theo, has been envisaging its future. Nothing as ambitious as the next few thousand years, but what might St Peters look like in 2025. Over the course of the last two years we have been systematically developing our new Strategic Intent. The process began with reviews of our Mission, the St Peters Why, Core Values and developing a shared understanding of the non-negotiables of a St Peters education – the things we would never change. The College Council and Senior Leadership spent time taking stock of where the College was at in relation to its existing Strategic Plan, and examining current educational and broader societal trends. Data from various stakeholder surveys and other instruments was examined, and feedback from various groups including students was considered. Time was spent imagining alternate futures and there was opportunity to float ‘moon shot’ ideas and engage in some ‘blue sky thinking’.

Consultation during the planning process resulted in the distillation of 12 Strategic Pillars and corresponding Strategic Intents that will help shape St Peters over the course of this decade and beyond. It will guide our decisions, actions and interactions into the future, and will create a framework for resource allocation across the College.

The result of this process is Plus Ultra 2025.

Plus Ultra 2025, our Strategic Intent, builds on the successes of the past 75 years, and lays out our collective vision, ambition and direction for St Peters in the years ahead.

Our Strategic Intent provides a road map to help St Peters reach its vision and mission.

In charting our course for this decade Plus Ultra 2025 is future focused and embraces leading practice, next practice and innovation; yet at the same time remains true to the vision of our founding Headmaster Mr W C Schneider, whose great hope for St Peters was that it would be ‘a school where your sons and daughters will get the best possible training, a school which should do much good for the church and the country’.

St Peters has benefited greatly from the contribution and commitment of staff, students, parents and Old Scholars and will further benefit from our continued work together as we implement Plus Ultra 2025.

I look forward to sharing the progress of our exciting future, Plus Ultra 2025 in coming editions of Plus Ultra.

To read our new Strategic Intent in full please visit the College’s website or scan the codes above.

Pictured: Our Strategic Pillars at a glance