Good Schools Spotlight: Presbyterian Ladies' College – Perth
Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Perth was founded in 1915 and has since sustained an international reputation for academic excellence and outstanding success in preparing young women to lead active, purposeful lives.
Evidence of our Scottish heritage is apparent throughout the beautiful Peppermint Grove campus as well as in the distinctive Blackwatch tartan uniform and PLC Pipe Band. However, perhaps the most significant legacy of our Scottish tradition is a belief in educational excellence, combined with a whole-of-person approach to intellectual, social, emotional and spiritual development.
Today this continues to be the philosophical foundation on which a PLC education is based.
PLC is:
- a school for a diverse and exceptional education that is innovative, vibrant, challenging and fosters personal excellence
- a community of friends, which is secure, inclusive and valuing of the individual
- an enduring legacy of values such as integrity, learning, community and effort
- a culture of learning for life and spiritual enquiry where character and leadership are nurtured to serve and shape the world.
Our values
PLC is a values-based community. Staff, students and parents subscribe to our values upon becoming members of the school. These values provide the compass by which members of the community come together to support one another and be of service to others.
Integrity (Honore): Strong ethical values make truth, compassion, respect and moral courage highly valued attitudes that are modelled every day. Integrity and a strong sense of social justice are particularly demonstrated through a commitment to celebrating diversity, including reconciliation for Indigenous peoples of Australia and striving for equal opportunities for women.
Learning: We gain knowledge and explore intellectual challenges and are inspired to value learning as inquirers, thinkers, risk-takers, communicators and through self-reflection. Students develop an understanding of themselves, their community and the world around them through a balance of academic, social, cultural and spiritual enquiry and physical pursuits.
Community: We value participation as an active means of making friends and building mutual understanding, showing care, support, respect and an open mind to recognise everyone’s value and contributions. The value of belonging to a community is in accepting rights and responsibilities and recognising that with privilege comes an individual and collective responsibility for the common good.
Effort (Labore): We recognise that little is achieved without effort and we encourage students to strive and achieve their best. Confidence, resilience and boldness develop through a culture of participation, a get-up-and-go attitude, having the courage to try new things, managing unfamiliar situations, learning from mistakes in a supportive environment and having opportunities to discover personal strengths.
At PLC, it's personal
PLC consistently enjoys outstanding academic results, which reflect the hard work of our girls and the committed staff who support them each day.
Ensuring each girl feels known and valued provides the strong foundation of what makes PLC so special. Our dedicated teachers provide world-class education, inspiring and developing each student’s individual gifts and talents.
Choice is fundamental to what we offer at PLC to ensure the needs of all girls are fully catered to. We are the only girls’ school in Western Australia to offer multiple tertiary pathways: the WA Certificate of Education, the world-renowned International Baccalaureate and the vocational education and training (VET) pathway.
In our junior school, the IB Primary Years Programme is a curriculum and pedagogy that focuses on developing the whole child, academically and social-emotionally. PLC has written its own curriculum, our Programme of Inquiry, which maps out six inquiries that each year group delves into. The inquiries have a central concept for the children to develop and the teachers’ guide the students to achieve this outcome, while injecting the explicit literacy and numeracy skills that are required in a primary school education.
In senior school we are committed to providing choice for our girls. Many schools construct their timetables by offering subjects in ‘blocks’ or ‘lines’, which reduces students’ options.
At PLC, we build our timetable around our students’ subject selections to ensure they can access their preferred study choice. We also offer shared classes with Scotch College, allowing further opportunities for choice.
We are committed to supporting each girl, giving her every opportunity to achieve her personal best. Our challenging academic programmes, supportive culture and exceptional learning environment means our girls consistently achieve outstanding results.
Our curriculum is delivered through a framework designed to nurture inquiry, promote academic excellence and engage students in a wide range of disciplines. Through this framework all girls are appreciated as individuals and able to experience academic success.
Underpinned by the Australian Curriculum, the framework emphasises building the capacity of individuals to develop into life-long learners. Our commitment to exceptional teaching fosters an authentic and richly interactive learning environment providing a personalised experience for each girl with a focus on developing skills for the future.
Boarding at PLC
At PLC our boarders are very important members of our community. Coming to PLC as a boarder is an exciting yet daunting prospect. To help ease the transition, the school has developed ‘About Being Connected @ PLC’, or ABC@ PLC. The programme used technology to facilitate connections between the boarders, boarding house staff and teachers.
Our buddy programme gives new boarders a helping hand throughout their transition to boarding. Structured and supervised homework and study sessions on weekdays, overseen by dedicated learning coordinators, will help your daughter form lifelong learning habits.
