Who: Students from IPSHA Schools

Facilitator and Coordinator: WELS and WELS lead educator and facilitator: Ben Righetti 

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We are delighted to invite student representatives from your school to join with students from around Victoria for the highly rated and highly successful IPSHA-WELS Student Leadership Program in 2025 (hereafter known as the Program).  In 2024, we had 123 students from 24 IPSHA Independent schools across Victoria register for the Program.   Schools, teachers and students who participated in the Program in past years rated it as ‘9 out of 10’.  Each year, many continue to tell us that the Program was ‘definitely the best’ or ‘one of the best’ programs they had participated in.  

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The Program has been designed as an enrichment leadership development experience for any student representative from your school.  This Program will complement and enrich the leadership development opportunities for students in their school community - and the student leadership program and culture in your school.  Your school can nominate any student that you feel would benefit from the Program.  This Program is equally designed for students who may have a formal role (i.e. school captain, house captain, service leader, environment leader, SRC), yet equally also for students who are service focussed leaders through their actions in their school or local community.   

 

The Student Leadership Program is again being offered by IPSHA in partnership with WELS (Wellbeing. Entrepreneurship. Leadership. Sustainability. www.wels.com.au.  The Program will again be coordinated and facilitated by WELS Founder and Lead Educator, Ben Righetti (MBA Grad.Dip.Ed MSoc.Dev. BSc. COR MEd*). 

 

The Program has 2 main components for interested schools:

• Term 1 - Core Program.  The stand-alone, single-day, Core Program offered in-person at 4 different schools in different regions of Melbourne and Victoria; in addition to the option of a live-online workshop session.

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• Extension Program - Term 2-4 (this is opt-in optional extension program).  The Extension Program builds on the learning and the peer-peer relationships from the Core Program.  It is focussed on service learning, student-lead service projects and peer-peer leadership learning and includes: a live-online workshop at the start of each Term

 

Schools can personalise the Program to the needs of your school and students by registering students for the components of the Program that you feel would be beneficial for your students.  School can register their students for the stand-alone single-day Core Program in Term 1, or the full year program (Core and Extension Program) that will complement their school-based leadership roles and experience.

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The aims and pedagogy of the Core Program will be very similar to the highly successful programs that have been run in previous years.  Participants will the opportunity to work in a team with student reps from other schools to explore the guiding question: What is Leadership?  Students will investigate the WELS model of Personalised and Situational Leadership, which includes 3 Layers of Leadership (Leadership of Self; Leadership with Others; Leadership as Service).  The specific capabilities/sub-questions explored will be:

• Leadership of Self (what do I believe leadership is; my unique leadership strengths and goals);

• Leadership with Others (relationship building; creating effective teams);

• Leadership as Service (what is service; school service project). 

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Participants will have the opportunity to explore these important leadership concepts and capabilities through a purpose-designed mix of practical and active experiential learning activities; interactive team-based workshop activities; reflective tasks; and, initial ideation and planning for a small-team leadership and service project that could be continued back in each student’s school community.

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