Our Visit to Kinross Wolaroi School, Orange NSW

What a wonderful day it was launching the AgriFutures program at Kinross Wolaroi School, Orange NSW. Dr. Andrew Parry, the principal of Kinross Wolaroi School, was the first to address the room. It was wonderful to hear him speak about the rapidly changing world and the need to focus on the educational needs of regional students, as this program aim to do. We would like to thank Dr. Andrew Parry for welcoming us to your school and embracing the entrepreneurial journeys of all your students.

Tom Riley, Director of the Regional Engagement Enterprise (TREE), then spoke to the students about the importance of building capacity into the agriculture industry. It was fantastic to hear Tom speak about the work they are doing with TREE. It’s an initiative started by Tom to ‘provide contextual, cross-curricular, community-based learning experiences’ for all Kinross Wolaroi students. This initiative is a fantastic demonstration of how a school can facilitate their students’ future careers by showing them how their education can translate into careers through holistic, contextual learning. Thank-you to Tom for lending your knowledge and expertise to these students and for letting our AgriFutures program support the wider school vision that the TREE initiative promotes. 

Finally, we were lucky enough to hear from some senior agriculture students, Holly Gutterson, Digby Cooper, Sarah Chamberlain and Hamish Donnelly, who had the pleasure of participating in work experience at various agricultural business including Westpac Agribusiness. As such, these students spoke about industry engagement opportunities and soft skills in practice. It was incredibly inspiring to hear about their experiences and the impact it had on each one of them. Sarah Chamberlain, one of the students who spent time at Westpac, had this to say about her time at Westpac, ‘I came into Westpac having very minimum knowledge about finance and having really no idea what things I would be doing. I can truly say that I have developed a lot of new knowledge about banking and financial literacy that will definitely help me throughout my future and has already helped me so much in business studies at school. I also believe that my time at Westpac has also helped develop me as an individual’. To hear the unique experience these students had and the impact it had on the trajectory of their future careers was incredible. We truly hope that our program will have the same, if not even more, of an impact on the students going through the AgriFutures program as they ignite the entrepreneurial flame inside each one of them. We would like to thank these students for sharing their experience and wish them all the best in the future.  

Once again, Thank-you to Kinross Wolaroi School for having us and we cannot wait to see the winning team in Sydney in November for #BBKDay where they will pitch their business to industry experts against other schools across Australia