AS many high school graduates return from a week in the schoolies limelight, the focus shifts to the next step in their lives.
They’ve celebrated time with friends, and now they await tertiary offers.
But for one group of graduates, priorities have shifted to the reunification with overseas families after not being able to see them for the last 18 months.
Twelve international students will be packing a Hills College graduation certificate in their luggage when they finally return to their home countries.
Hills Head of International Programs Vanessa Newbery is excited to see what they achieve next.
“Half of our year 12s will stay here and go onto further education and the other half are going home,” she said.
ATAR offers are set to be released on December 17, but schools are already being briefed on how their students have gone.
This past year has stretched numbers thin at their international college, but Ms Newbery is optimistic they will start seeing more overseas faces arrive for semester two next year.
The federal government announced last week that Australia will reopen to some vaccinated students from December 1.
Some of the outstanding achievements at Hills this year were by Lara Davidson, who won the $24,000 Sir Samuel Griffith scholarship for Griffith University, and Minh Doan and Amadeus Susanto, who signed letters of intent for golf programs at American colleges.
For the graduating cohort of Canterbury College, this past year has been about instilling greater pride in the school colours and premiership wins at interschool sport.
Head of secondary Rebecca Adamson has seen them band together and deliver on their goal.
“It was just the little things with how the students turned up to support each other at key school events like sports days, the wearing of the uniform, all those things,” she said.
“They were a group that took away six premiership wins across netball, hockey, volleyball, and athletics, and their sportsmanship was outstanding.”
They also got into the groove of dealing with COVID disruptions, which were shorter than last year, having had experience dealing with it in 2021, which built more resilience.
“They quickly jumped into online learning and changed what they needed to do to keep the year going,” Ms Adamson said.
