We were so fortunate to have recently had two students, Johanna and Karoliina visit us from their school in Finland, Oulunkylän Yhteiskoulu, a partner school in the Strategic Alliance of Global Educators (SAGE). The students were successful in the SAGE Project Passport 2018 initiative with their project, Wellbeing at School, an important topic for young people in our global community and one that is receiving a great deal of attention in schools and more broadly education. An aspect of this project was to choose one of our SAGE schools to visit if successful, enabling the opportunity to facilitate aspects of the project and collaborate with members of the school community. The Camberwell Girls Grammar community was most excited to learn that Johanna and Karoliina would be travelling to our school and would have the opportunity to inform us first hand of their project intentions, meet members of our community and collaborate on some potential initiatives.

A great deal was achieved during the visit in June, including the gathering of important research and data based around our senior student experiences of wellbeing, to further support the project and enable initial comparisons to be made between our two school environments. In addition, our students had the valuable opportunity to learn about the lifestyle and culture of Finland, highlighting some similarities and showing great interest in some of the key differences. Our families that hosted Johanna and Karoliina, provided experiences of family life in Australia and facilitated visits to many local attractions and experiences.

This opportunity has provided the chance to pose and discuss the potential for future learning projects for our schools. It became obvious through sharing conversation that whilst we are found in very different parts of our global community, we certainly have many areas of common interest and that our school communities would gain greatly from collaborating further on shared learning experiences.

We look forward to receiving the results of the project to share with our school community for further thought and the potential opportunities that may be planned for future learning.