At Living Faith, we believe that we need to prepare students to thrive in an ever-changing world. We don’t know what kinds of jobs our children may have in the future. What we do know is that the world will need learners. People who can adapt, evolve, bounce back, communicate, create, problem solve and connect. This thinking runs through all elements of our teaching and learning here at Living Faith. It is important to us to foster a culture of lifelong learning and developing skills that will allow students to succeed no matter what they choose to do later in life. While we teach the Australian curriculum, we also look beyond academic goals to explicitly teach and develop lifelong soft skills, which we call contemporary competencies. Students with these skills can learn independently, adapt and persevere to overcome unexpected challenges.

Some of the main contemporary competencies we intentionally embed at Living Faith are:

• Resilience
• Collaboration
• Self-Direction
• Adaptability/Grid
• Reasoning
• Grit
• Creativity
• Problem Solving
• Leadership
• Initiative
• Communication
• Service
• Emotional Intelligence
• Global Awareness

Each year level has three to four contemporary competencies, which are explicitly taught and reported on as part of the student school report.

‘We are learning to problem solve in Year 6 and learn that there are lots of different ways to solve any problem. If one way doesn’t work, we try another way. It takes a bit of resilience. In Maths, we get to see lots of different ways to solve things in number talks. We get to experience other ways of thinking.’ - Joseph (Year 6)

‘We learn about communication in Year 4. Communication is important to help build friendships, collaborate in groups and help us solve problems. We learn how to present to our class and participate in group discussions on lots of topics.’ - Phoebe (Year 4)

‘We learn how to serve others by helping people like our teacher or friends. Service is being kind and thinking of other people. Serving people makes me happy.’ - Beau (Prep)

- Bianca Ravi, Director of Learning