Senior Prefects’ Conference
We encourage members of our Upper VI leadership team to attend the Senior Prefects Conference, organised by the Society of Heads, which takes place in August each year. This residential conference is for those students who have been appointed as Senior Prefects in their schools for the following academic year and is an inspirational and extremely popular conference. This year several of our Upper VI leadership team, led by our Head Girl, Billie Morrison, attended. Here Billie writes about her experience at the Senior Prefects Conference.
‘During the summer holidays, Rhiannon Phillips, House Captain of St George, Jasleen Deu, House Captain of St Gabriel and I attended the Senior Prefects Conference, organised by the Society of Heads which was held at Rishworth School in Yorkshire.
Over the three days, we learnt crucial skills in teamwork, child safety, forward planning and organisation as well as making many new friends. There were numerous educational activities, such as a team dynamics exercise where we labelled our various prefect teams as extroverts or introverts in order to understand their strengths as parts of our teams. We also had a briefing on child safety and safeguarding which was grounding and very informative. Another helpful experience was a talk on public speaking and how to hold a crowd’s attention using short, sharp, sentences, anecdotes and a dash of humour. With many speeches coming up at various welcome evenings and open days, this experience was probably one of the most helpful for me, if a little stressful when we had to present in front of all the other students there.
At the end of the course there was an etiquette lesson and wine tasting to prepare us for a formal dinner with a guest speaker, the Manager of Manchester United’s Construction Team. I was selected to give a Vote of Thanks to our guest speaker and responded to his speech on the benefits of deferring to your team, working with your senior staff and, overall, striving to help the community that you represent and striving to make their lives better.
We all received individual reports that spoke of our strengths and weaknesses. Receiving the report was lovely and was a great finish to a fantastic experience. We would like to thank Rishworth School for organising our time at the conference and I would urge future prefects to attend. It was and still is a privilege to have been elected as House Captains and Head Girl, and this course only reinforced our determination to do the best by St Augustine’s Priory and its students.’
The report Billie received from the conference organisers is a testament to the quality of our Upper VI leaders. This is a section which we are proud to print:
“Billie has risen to the top among a group in individuals from across the country. This is no mean feat. Her delivery of the vote of thanks to the visiting speaker was so good that it has to rank as one of the most outstanding responses we have seen at the conference over the years I have been involved. Billie is an understated, slow burner who is a determined and committed team player – a real gem!”
