Prizegiving Address, Christchurch Town Hall, Wednesday 5th December 2007

Ladies and Gentlemen, girls,

We are here tonight to celebrate. To celebrate as a community all those who have dared to be excellent, to celebrate those who have given it their best, to celebrate those who had a go, who persisted, who tried, who stepped outside their comfort zone. Whether you are coming up onto the stage for an award or not, we celebrate your commitment, confidence and courage.

Many of you will have seen television news pictures this year of fires in Australia and California. It seems as soon as the fire fighters get one area under control another springs up to be dealt with. The fire fighters move methodically with the certainty that comes from experience, knowledge and skills, managing the risk to themselves and to others. Life is a bit like that. There are periods where it can be like a series of bushfires – you just deal with one and think it's OK and then another springs up. And there can be long periods with no fires at all: periods of calm, security, safety.

We are all like fire fighters – our lives have periods of calm, of routine, of small fires that are easily dealt with and of larger fires. As children our parents do the fire fighting on our behalf, but as we move through adolescence to adulthood we have to learn to deal with life's fires ourselves. We have to learn the skills, we have to acquire the knowledge, we have to be able to make choices and decisions, sometimes without a great deal of time.

We have to be able to draw on our inner resources and our experience. And that's the life we educators and parents have to help our young people to deal with. Not just the calm quiet patches or the expectation that others will step in and make things right.

The teen years are challenging. Young people juggle their emotional changes with a range of new and often conflicting demands – pressure from their peers, exploration of new and sometimes risky behaviours, the moving line between being an adult and a child. Resilience and adaptability are words you hear a lot these days, and those of you who attended JoAnn Deak's workshop will remember that she believes them to be the two most important attributes our young people need; that, in fact, we all need.

The concepts of resiliency and adaptability were initially used in the context of the eco system but have broadened to be used in socioeconomic and environmental terms. Whereas resilience is the ability to recover from an adverse situation, adaptability is the ability to survive in this new and challenging environment. Both of these need to be nurtured and encouraged and need to be developed gradually, incrementally. To be resilient you need to be able to deal with challenges and risk, to step outside the comfortable, to have some idea of what to do when things don't go according to plan. The lives of many children around the world are full of these challenges on a daily basis. But the lives of many of the children and young people in New Zealand are not. We live in a society that is increasingly risk averse, and our tolerance to risk and our ability to face adversity or danger is thus being steadily eroded.

As parents and educators we are constantly faced with the fine line between over protection, or at its extreme the cotton wool syndrome, and allowing teenagers to learn from experience, to find how close to the fl ame is too close. Again, those who heard JoAnn Deak will remember her vivid description of the teenage brain, with the emotion hub, the amygdala fully developed – indeed a bit over developed – and the frontal lobe which controls reason and judgment still with rather a long way to go. Hence the need to manage the risks that young people are exposed to – or to which they expose themselves.

It's easy for a school to avoid activities that have an element of risk – and increasingly schools are doing this. There are often issues with parents who support their children's wish to opt out of things which challenge them or that the child doesn't think they will enjoy. Indeed, in many challenging situations there should be a level of risk and it is unrealistic for any school to promise safety. What must be offered is that students gain an understanding of risk, and that they develop the necessary thought processes and management tools. Life without risk is dull. As the saying goes, if no one ever took risks, Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.

Whether at camp, on the sports field or in the classroom, we at Rangi Ruru make no apology for the fact that we aim to provide a wide range of challenging experiences for our girls so that they will develop physical, intellectual, social and emotional resiliency. These experiences are fundamental to our philosophy of doing the best we can to ensure that when the girls leave school they have had the exposure to experiences that build resilience and adaptability, healthy opportunities to succeed and to fail without the high probability of undue harm and that they can deal with the challenges that life will throw at them. Russell Hoban is a children's writer – his books are probably on many of your bookshelves at home. His most well known story is The Mouse and his Child, and like many children's stories, it tells of a search and of courage. One of the characters, Muskrat, says “you've got to make those daring leaps or you're
nowhere.”

Life is about daring leaps. It's about facing the unexpected, the uncertain and the unknown. For some girls outdoor camps can present uncertainty and the unknown. Living Springs, Wainui, Boyle River, Castle Hill, Outward Bound and the Leadership Camp at Hanmer are all challenging in different ways for different people. But then you ask leavers what were the highlights of their time at Rangi Ruru one of the most frequent answers is the camps. I think part of the reason for this is that the camps test everyone differently. They are a great leveller, enabling girls to demonstrate and share their skills and learn new ones, to test themselves, to have a go, to face some fears, to learn which risks to take and which to avoid.

The buzz is in the achievement. For many simply being away from the comfy bed of home is difficult – and all the more reason why they should do it. It is only by proving to ourselves that we can do something that we will gain the strength and confi dence to deal with the unexpected. The Year 12 Leadership Camp has moved its venue from Living Springs to Hanmer and this year contained activities that were more demanding than in previous years. It was really good to see girls tackling things which clearly they were nervous about– the tree climbing is one that springs to mind.

This year a group of senior girls, along with Reverend Smith and Ms Elliott, and lead by Old Girl Emily Broughton, went on a mission trip to Vanuatu, to work at Onesua School. This was a step into the unknown, and a step into a situation that was challenging. It was a well prepared group, down to the last just-in-case packet of Chux Multicloths, but nevertheless every girl had her own fears about this venture not only into the unknown, but into a very different reality from her own. These girls have learnt a lot about themselves and about others and will be able to make future decisions based on these experiences. Emily Broughton said of the trip “my vision was to help our brothers and sisters in Vanuatu but also for us to learn from them. Although we may be rich in money they are rich in culture and values”. These are exactly the kinds of experiences that build resilience, adaptability and self knowledge.

The number of overseas exchanges we operate has grown over the last few years, and this is a welcome growth. It's quite scary to leave the comfort of the known and go half way around the world to stay with a family you don't even know, and who possibly don't have very much English, and you have less than four years of Spanish, French, Japanese or German. The girls who are selected have to be resilient. While these exchanges are carefully risk assessed, girls need to welcome the challenge of change, they have to cope to a large degree on their own and be prepared for the unexpected without their usual backstops. Challenges do not have to happen only outside of the school and short rubber bands can and should be stretched a number of ways. It's a risk taking a subject that you find hard, that you might not do very well in. Sometimes this is something you just can't avoid. It's a risk putting your name down for something that you haven't tried before and for which you might not be selected. This is no reason not to have a go. If you don't get selected, refl ect, learn and move on.

It's a risk performing in front of others – but so many girls do it, do it well and are warmly supported and admired by their peers. Our Head Girl led the way this year by deliberately trying new things, including ballet, surfing and acting. When Claire Bubb came to me last year and said that she had been talking with the girls and they thought they would like to do 'Macbeth' this year – something meaty, something with good dramatic roles – I was really pleased, but of course stated the obvious, that there aren't very many women in it – three reasonable parts and the hags. She said they had already thought of that and all the characters would be female. Not just played by females, but would be female.

A very risky concept, but I was cautiously happy to let them develop the idea. I guess that was a calculated risk based on faith in those guiding the process. And, as those of you who saw Macbeth will know, it worked astonishingly well. There is no doubt it was a risk that was worth taking. Every girl who takes part in a production, whether it is the intermediate school, junior or senior production, puts herself on the line and does something that requires not just a lot of commitment but also courage.

As a community are we becoming too risk averse with our young people? Throughout the country children are being driven to school instead of learning how to catch one or even two buses, or ride a bike or walk, parents are only a cellphone call or a text away to come to the rescue, public and school pools are being closed and schools are reassessing whether or not to have outdoor education and monkey bars and jungle gyms. It seems unusual that in a time when more than ever we know that our children need to build physical and social resilience and adaptability, we are making it increasingly diffi cult for children to participate in the very experiences that can help them develop good risk skills and confidence in their own abilities.

It's a hard call for a parent to find the balance between keeping your child safe and allowing them to test the waters, to experience something that will stand them in good stead. To quote Admiral Grace Murray Hopper “A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for”. If we constantly protect our children they will learn nothing about life skills, about their own buoyancy and not only will they not recognise the signs of a storm, they will not be able to make the right decisions to ride it out.