This school year, in a return to pre-Covid habits, our Year 7 students received their school laptops two weeks into the new academic year. This timing allows our youngest students to focus on the process of settling into a new school, with all that that entails, without adding the great excitement of laptops into the mix.

With laptops having been handed out, it has been an absolute pleasure to start working with our Year 7s in their Free Learning classes, where the focus is on IT skills. It is easy to assume that young people, with their love for all things digital, come pre-equipped with the IT skills and concepts needed to put powerful laptops to productive use. In reality, whilst students do pick up digital skills very quickly, they tend to benefit greatly from structured guidance towards those skills that will serve them in the long term: desktop basics, keyboard shortcuts, screen capture, staying safe online, reverse image search, document layout and more.

Through Free Learning, our Year 7s are given the chance to learn these approaches, and much more, in a positive and exploratory manner, with their peers. It is our hope that these experiences build a foundation for positive and effective device usage, which will serve our students well in and beyond school.