Our past, our future, our choice
Just where did 2025 go? It seems only a shake of the head ago that we were welcoming in a new year, full of promise, hope, and possibility. How has your 2025 unfurled? Was it more than you expected? Less? Much the same? More importantly, why do you think this is the case?
Here we are in the first few days of summer…lengthening days…languid afternoons…early sunrises that break through the curtains and call many of us to rise earlier than we’d like. It seems not much more than yesterday we were reflecting on shortening days as the summer of 2024-2025 began to disappear and we ramped up for Term 1 of 2025…a quarter of a century after the anticipation of a new millenium with its attendant collapse of online society and the hoarding of water, beans, and batteries…and who knew it would take another two decades, in the grip of COVID-19, before we realised the social anxieties attached to having sufficient toilet paper! But I digress…
What is it that characterises a whole year for you, especially in the context of your educational leadership? How have you grown? Whose voices have you heeded? Respected, but set aside? How have you reconfigured? What’s stayed the same? What’s changed, and why has this been necessary?
Where have you bounced ahead into new possibilities? Become bogged down in tired narratives and stifling tropes from days long past? More importantly, when did you set aside the time and privilege even to ask such searching questions? Sadly, this time of year can become beset with pragmatic priorities like timetables, staffing, rooming, and just keeping students engaged with learning that we can be tempted to think such questions an indulgence not available to everyone.
It’s tempting, also, to get to this part of the year and imbibe a celebratory quaff, if that takes your fancy. But that seems authentic only if there’s cause to do so. Because, despite all that 2025 has offered to us, next week opens a brave, or confounding, new world. The scourge, or joy (depending on your perspective), of social media will become restricted to thousands of teenagers across the nation.
With legislation firmly in place, we are about to enter a “claustro-media” age. Instead of social media being the unregulated Wild West for under 16s (despite what social media companies express), it will contain and constrain what children and adolescents can access, a time when access to social media platforms will become restricted to under 16 students across Australia.
So, in what way can this be considered a claustro-media age? Claustro is the Spanish form of an enclosed space of a monastery, the cloister, that part of a religious community where daily life is separated from the outside world. In the medieval world, withdrawal from wider social life provided opportunity to focus on matters of greater and more noble humanity, of purpose, of transcendence, and of one’s ultimate meaning…our telos.
The ban has uncertain outcomes. Parents, caregivers, and teachers alike are perplexed at the implications. What we do know, though, is that it will bring a reset to how children and adolescents engage with each other, with the world, and with this wonderful life of education.
The NSW Branch Executive met recently to map out some priorities for 2026 and we will be launching a special podcast series throughout the year probing these, and related, issues. We’ll have details for you early in the new year.
I want to thank the Executive for their generous work throughout the year: Sue Bryen, Amanda Conray, Simon Crook, Kirsten Macaulay, Larissa Maraga, Brenda Quayle, Corinna Robertson, and Vicki Treble. We also acknowledge our group lost Greg Whitby who passed away in August, although he had stepped down from the Executive earlier than this.
May this festive season be a time of celebration, of joy, of rest, and of recharging for whatever lies ahead in 2026.
Paul Kidson
ACEL NSW Branch President