Fitzroy Community School - Junior Secondary

Year Seven at Fitzroy Community School – 2025

Fitzroy Community School, a leading light in Melbourne schooling since its founding in 1976, will be offering a year seven program in 2025. In keeping with the FCS mission, we aim for partnerships with parents in the raising of happy, able and well-rounded citizens. Our graduates speak to the success of this endeavour through their abilities and character. This experience informs our next adventure, where we will utilise the knowledge and experience gained over the last four decades to add the junior secondary years.

Melbourne has some great schools, schools that set the bar at a high level for academics, that run some significant adventures and schools that play a fine role in nurturing young people. Our program aims to achieve all three – with the physical challenges of bushcraft and sport, the social confidence gained through community services and the academic and personal self-assurance achieved through a thorough literacy and numeracy offering. These combine to help build happy, confident young people.

I see these early teenage years as a time when daring adventures should be embraced. Our program is offered to those young people who share this desire to experience the many varied opportunities that this world brings, to grasp them, and grow.

Our year seven (and eight from 2026) program will extend these young people, giving them the academic skills to be active citizens and building confidence and self-belief that they can make a difference. Our camps and sporting offerings, combined with our social activities and community service engagements are aimed at expanding the capacities of young teens. We believe that immersion in a program in which academics, physical confidence and inter-personal skills are learnt, encouraged and expanded, will see these young people flourish.

Our experience to date has led us to the realisation that there are some young people who want more; who want to go further, who want to strive and grow and make a contribution. Our year seven and eight programs are offered to aspirational all-rounders. This program will not suit all students. Our offering is for those young people who are eager, who want to be challenged and challenge themselves, not just in the classroom, but in the wider world, and who have a sense that a full life involves helping the group you find yourself in work a little better.

The confidence to contribute, to be heard and believe in oneself comes from success. This comes not from spoon fed and neatly packaged achievements, but through effort, overcoming setbacks, facing challenges and the developing insights into how things could have gone differently.

My experience of young people is that many really do want things to go well, to help, to offer their energy and abilities to make things better. Many don’t know what to do or lack the confidence to contribute to the gaps that they identify. The mix of academic, social and physical challenges that inform our program is the vehicle through which skills and self-belief are made real. Our school believes that we have a duty to work for the common good and to make a positive difference. Students will expected to seek out neighbours and others in our local community experiencing loneliness and illness, and to offer support.

The academic program will include significant content and extending capacities. The adventures will not be weather-dependent as our commitment to character is not contingent upon blue skies and mild temperatures. We will embrace the joy of games in the rain and sweat at the top of the mountain, with the extra sense of achievement that unexpected conditions bring.

So, if you want to grow in knowledge and expand your academic skills, aspire for an education that builds character, and are a young person who wants to help others, then our early secondary program may be for you. Please reflect on the following.

1. Are you ambitious, keen to push yourself and work hard?

2. Would you like to participate in challenging outdoor activities?

3. Do you help the group you are in to work well?

The children who have had the good fortune to attend Fitzroy Community School have flourished through having leaders of character, working with educators who live the qualities that we aspire to nurture in our children. In launching this new venture, Kate fits this mould of good people who through their attributes and personality inspire and cultivate goodness in our children. Kate has a keen insight into the path to character, has thought deeply about child-raising and is confident to listen to her heart in determining the best path forward. It is therefore my great pleasure to have Kate in the role of Head of Campus for this venture of Fitzroy Community School.

Yours,

Timothy Berryman (Principal)