Ivanhoe Girls’ Grammar School is dedicated to preparing students for productive, fulfilling, and sustainable futures in a rapidly changing and increasingly complex world.

Recognising that many future careers are uncertain or yet to exist, the School focuses on equipping students with essential transferable skills – such as independent learning, collaboration, critical thinking, innovation, empathy, and adaptability – that are highly valued across all fields.

Anticipating significant shifts in education and aligned with global frameworks like the OECD’s Learning Compass 2030, Ivanhoe Girls’ is proactively embedding these capabilities in our new empowerED Learning Program, utilising the University of Melbourne, New Metrics, Complex Competencies, ensuring students can confidently navigate and thrive in unfamiliar future contexts.

empowerED will be delivered from Semester 2 in 2027, in a dedicated term, in Years 7, 8, 9 and 10. Our students will be coached and mentored to develop, plan and execute projects that spark their interest. During their empowerED term each year, students will be accessing the Australian Curriculum and preparing for their VCE, but they will be learning through projects and experiences rather than ‘subjects’. They will get to experience the freedom of being ‘off timetable’ so that they can go deeper into their learning.

A purpose-built Learning Hub for empowerED is under construction so our students can immerse themselves in the program for a term each year whilst staying connected to their co-curricular activities, House, and all the support structures we offer them.

With the construction program still on schedule, the empowerED Learning Hub is expected to be completed, commissioned and handed over to us in April 2027. That will provide us ample time to familiarise staff and students with the new facility, and to potentially run some short-term trial activities with students, prior to the formal commencement of the empowerED program in Term 3 2027. It also ensures that, should we encounter any unforeseen delays over the next 10 months, we can still have confidence in a successful Term 3 2027 commencement of empowerED for our Year 8 students.

View a fly through of the empowerED Learning Hub through the link below: