Leaning Into Challenge: Building Character and Conscience at Somerset in 2026

All our staff are now back as we welcomed our teachers and teacher aides earlier this week and we are all excited by what we are going to achieve together in 2026.

On Wednesday, we had Kurt Fearnley AO present to our entire staff. Kurt is a three-time Paralympic gold medalist and two-time Commonwealth Games gold medalist. He has won over 40 marathons, including New York, Chicago and London in a career spanning more than 20 years. In 2009 Kurt crawled the Kokoda track, in Papua New Guinea, to raise awareness of men’s health. Kurt was also a member of the winning Sydney to Hobart yacht crew, Investec Loyal, in 2012. He was the New South Wales Australian of the Year for 2019.

His message to our staff was around leaning into hard situations, about acknowledging that strength is not so much about muscle, but about resilience and mindset. His message was powerful, extremely humbling but challenging and reminded us all that there are times when we will have to overcome challenges, but we do so with the support of others and knowing we learn so much through the journey. This is also an important message for our students and I hope to bring Kurt back later in the year to share with students in the senior school.

It’s been great to see our Year 7s and new students on campus this week and we can’t wait to have everyone return next Tuesday! I am excited by all that 2026 is going to bring. As Somerset begins to implement our new strategic plan, we do so under our updated mission; Empowering students to cultivate character and conscience through purpose and human connection, prepared to thrive in a changing world.

Throughout the year, I want to unpack what I think this means, but as I shared with staff earlier this week, the most powerful part of this how we focus on Character and Conscience. For me conscience and character go hand-in-hand. Character is the sum of a person's moral and ethical qualities, reflecting their inner values and how they typically behave, even when others aren’t looking, while conscience is the inner voice or sense that judges the moral rightness or wrongness of one's own actions, intentions, and character, prompting feelings of guilt or obligation.

Essentially, character is who you are, built on virtues, and conscience is the internal guide that assesses if your character is acting rightly. Our focus this year is on how we provide the opportunities, the experiences and the time, to develop, talk about and build character and conscience, both within and outside the classroom. In other words, how are we building a backpack of skills to enable our students to thrive beyond the safety and support of our College.

It’s an exciting journey and thanks for being part of it in 2026.