As we come to the end of Term 3 - I hope it has been a successful one for our students and families.

Year 12 celebrations

Our Year 12s will finish the term with their breakfast, final assembly and school ball.  It is a wonderful celebration of their time at KSHS, and we acknowledge this amazing cohort of students as they prepare for their final assessments and to transition to school leavers. 

We will say our final farewells at their Valedictory on 20 November at the Regal Theatre, and information has been distributed directly to families.

New canteen management

Our school and the P&C are pleased to let you know that Metro Canteens has been the successful candidate who will be taking over the operation of the canteen from the start of Term 4.  Metro Canteens has extensive experience running school canteens, and the selection panel feel they will be a good fit for the school community.

From the start of Term 4 the canteen will be using Flexischools for online ordering and cashless payments.  This means that you will be able to order and pay for items from our school without needing to pay cash or visit in person.

To create an account, you will need to download the app.  You can find instructions here. 

Flexischools is Australia's number 1 school ordering solution and operates in more than 2000 schools across Australia. Flexischools takes a market leading approach to information security, having received ISO 27001 certification for its information security management system, and has also successfully participated in the Safer Technologies 4 Schools (ST4S) process - a national standardised approach to evaluating digital products and services used by schools across Australia.

Free travel with a Student SmartRider

Students with a valid Student SmartRider can enjoy free travel on Transperth services for any journey from Monday to Friday, until the end of the 2025 school year.

To access free travel, students must tag on and tag off correctly with a SmartRider every time they use public transport. When travelling by bus, students need to tag on at the front door. They can tag off at any door when exiting.

Tagging on and off helps Transperth plan enough buses to get everyone to and from school safely and on time.

Further information can be found on the Transperth website.

Shrek The Musical Jr

Once again, our KPA students have excelled themselves in our annual production.  We send a huge congratulations to Anna and Michelle for another successful production this year – and thank all the staff, students and parents who have supported them to make this happen.

Enjoy this post Shrek The Musical Jr | Stage Whispers

Congratulations – Youth Innovation Think Tank

Congratulations to our team of Year 12 student who participated in the Youth Innovation Think Tank grand final.  There were 4 teams who made it this far and although they did not win, they were very competitive, and the judges excited by their pitch.  It has been a wonderful opportunity to extend their skills and thinking.

Congratulations – WA Robotics Playoffs

Our STEM Club students competed as Team 9191 – My Chemical Robots at the WARP event.  The event saw 30 teams from across WA, including entries from Curtin and Murdoch universities. Our team placed second overall, finishing just behind a Curtin University alliance, and was awarded the Creativity Award for their innovative robot design.  What a super effort!

Congratulations – apprenticeship success

Congratulations to Kurt Wilson and Chevy Coleman for securing apprenticeships with ISUZU Major Motors and High Ground Electrical following their WPL program.

KSESC – Kalability Basketball carnival

Congratulations to our Year 12 Sports Coaching students who recently umpired and officiated at the Kalamunda Secondary Education Support Centre’s Kalability Basketball carnival.

Visual Art Educator workshop

Thank you to GAT Coordinator Emma Goodin, and former GAT student Eleisha Pirouet who hosted a Visual Art Educator workshop at the school.

Dance and Fashion workshop at WAPPA

Our Dance students observed and participated in high-level classical and contemporary classes, while Fashion students explored design, costume, and production studios.  It was a valuable excursion that highlighted discipline, creativity and professionalism opening curiosity in creative pathways.

Dance and Drama showcase

A wonderful celebration of the student’s talent, hard work and dedication and inspiring to see the growth and creativity they brought to the stage.

Outdoor Adventure Program

Year 7 OAP class alongside the Year 12 Cert II OREC class participated in a mountain bike ride to Pickering Brook, while the Year 8 OAP group made their way south to hike up Bluff Knoll in the Stirling Ranges, Bald Head Trail in Albany and a tour of the ANZAC museum to finish off the week. 

RUOK day

Our students hosted activities for our students and we thank the Rapid Relief Team who hosted a staff breakfast.

KSHS – Green Team

Our Green Team along with students from Certificate Conservation and Ecosystems and Science in Practice courses recently participated in the WasteSorted Student Meet.

House Athletics Carnival

What glorious weather we had for our House Athletics Carnival this year.  Our students as always enjoyed dressing up in their house colours and participating in a range of events throughout the day.  The winning house was Pegasus.

Thank you to our P&C

A special thanks go to our parents who helped out during the Athletics carnival – navigating a temperamental BBQ.  Thank you for your community spirit and support for our students.

Another successful EAT program event by our P&C

New building – undercroft

The new undercroft area is proving a super teaching space for our Outdoor Education classes – with students practising putting up their tents.

Japanese host students – Nogi Junior High School

We thank all our parents and students who hosted one of these students from Nogi School.  They had a wonderful time visiting classes, sight seeing and enjoying time with their host families.

2026 – Year 7 enrolments

We encourage all families to finalise their enrolments for Year 7 next year as soon as possible to assist us in planning our classes.  Places are still available

Contributions and Charges

We encourage all parents to finalise their payments for the 2025 school year particularly those in high cost and specialist programs.  If you have not yet completed these please contact us to arrange a payment plan.

Gifted and Talented applications for 2027

Gifted and Talented Secondary Selective Entrance programs offer enriched learning, expert teachers, and opportunities to connect with universities and industry.  Testing starts in Year 6 for entry in year 7, with limited places in Years 9 – 11.

Applications open – October 2025 Register your interest

Japan Trip

We wish our Japanese Tour group all the best for their travel to Japan over the holidays.

Have a wonderful holiday break.

By the time this Review goes out to you all, our Year 12’s will have had their farewell Breakfast and assembly and should be enjoying their Ball. They have done an amazing job to get this far but the year isn’t over….

ATAR Students: You have your exams over the holidays and then you are back at school from October 16 to October 24. You then have your final exams in Term 4. All the details around the final exams can be located at

https://senior-secondary.scsa.wa.edu.au/assessment/examinations/examination-timetables

and students can also access their individualised timetable.

General Students: if we need, we will be making phone calls early next term to get you back here to school to complete any outstanding work that may have an impact on your WACE.

Valedictory : This year, Valedictory will be held on Thursday November 20 at the Regal Theatre in Subiaco. An email has previously been sent to parents with ticketing details but if you have any questions, please contact the front office.

Thank you everyone for your support of this wonderful group. The end is in sight, but we aren’t there just yet.

VacSwim offers children aged 5 to 17 the opportunity to develop and progress their swimming and water safety skills during the school holidays, with programs available for all skill levels across the State. As we approach the warmer months, it's important to help families ensure their children are safe and confident in and around water.

Enrolments for the upcoming VacSwim summer programs will close on 15 October 2025.

Further details, including program locations and enrolment instructions, can be found on our website.

Students with a valid Student SmartRider can enjoy free travel on Transperth services for any journey from Monday to Friday, until the end of the 2025 school year.

To access free travel, students must tag on and tag off correctly with a SmartRider every time they use public transport. When travelling by bus, students need to tag on at the front door. They can tag off at any door when exiting.

Tagging on and off helps Transperth plan enough buses to get everyone to and from school safely and on time.

Further information can be found on the Transperth website.

The Kalamunda Club (The Club) would like to offer an Introduction to Lawn Bowls to local students and their parents/grandparents or any other adult relative who wish to experience lawn bowls. Each student must be accompanied by an adult.

The offer includes five weekly sessions of 1 hour, where a student and an adult family member are provided with the basics of lawn bowls. Each group will be supervised by an experienced bowler who will provide guidance on the basics of the game.

The sessions will be from 4pm on either Monday or Tuesday afternoons and will be held at the Club. The Club will provide bowls and appropriate bowls equipment, and participants will be required to bowl in appropriate bowling footwear (flat shoes) or in bare feet.

This initiative is free.

Please contact Steve Turner on 0417180158 with any questions and to make arrangements for the introductory sessions   

10 Scientific Tips to Make You Better at Conversation

As humans, we’re talking to each other constantly. With all that practice, we must be pretty good at it—right?  Not exactly. As a professor at Harvard Business School and author of Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, Alison Wood Brooks teaches people how to have better conversations. She also debunks the widespread myths and assumptions that cause us to have less-than-stellar interactions. In fact, many of our intuitions about how to talk to each other can create awkwardness, misunderstandings, and missed opportunities.

As Brooks explains, conversation is a skill, and research findings have a lot to say about how we can become better at it, so our conversations are more enjoyable, more productive, and better at bringing us closer together.

Here are 10 fascinating findings from Brooks’s book for you to keep in mind the next time you’re getting ready to chat with another human.

1. Preparing topics in advance makes conversations better

Do you think about what you’re going to discuss with people in advance? Research by Brooks and her colleagues suggests that only about 18% of us actually prepare topics for conversations, and half of us believe that doing so will make conversations less enjoyable.

But even spending 30 seconds planning some talking points makes conversations more fluid, with less awkward transitions, fewer pauses, and less umm-ing and uhh-ing, her research suggests. It also makes people feel less anxious and more confident.

In Brooks’s Harvard classroom, her students often worry that prepping topics is embarrassing, manipulative, or just plain unnecessary—but year after year, they reliably find conversations about prepared topics to be more fun.

Preparing topics doesn’t mean we need to be rigid about making sure to discuss each one. It just gives us an insurance policy for when conversation falters, and it can help us drift toward more meaningful discussions rather than defaulting to the often easy, concrete topics that spring to our minds in the moment.

2. Our intuitions about which topics make for rewarding conversation are wrong

Brooks and her colleague Mike Yeomans gave 1,000 people a list of 50 topics to rate which would be best for conversation—from favourite books to grief and loss to a perfect day—and then had people actually dive into those topics. The conversations that people ended up enjoying were not the ones they predicted. For example, “When did you last cry in front of another person?”—anticipated as the second least enjoyable topic—was, in practice, highly enjoyable to discuss.

“It’s almost impossible to tell in advance whether a conversation topic will be good or bad,” Brooks writes.

3. Switching topics more frequently makes conversations more enjoyable

In a study by Brooks and her colleagues, pairs of strangers either had conversations as they normally would or tried to get through 12 topics in 10 minutes. At the end of the day, those who tried to cover more ground enjoyed their conversations more—a bump from 5 to 6 on a scale of 7. And, surprisingly, their conversations didn’t seem to lack depth.

In other research of 30-minute conversations online, more people thought they had discussed too few topics rather than too many—20% vs. 11%. Any hesitancy that we feel in the moment about changing the subject may be misguided. 

4. People who ask questions are more likable

In a 2017 study by Brooks and her colleagues, people who asked more questions in a 15-minute conversation were better liked by their conversation partners. Similarly, in four-minute speed-dating conversations, singles who asked more follow-up questions were more likely to get a second date - and no one ever got to the point of asking “too many” questions.

If you think you’re already a great question-asker, think again: According to Brooks’s research, friends and daters both overestimated how many questions they asked in conversations.

And if you’re hesitant to ask certain questions that you might be curious about, you can relax a little: A 2021 study found that being asked sensitive questions—about affairs, abortion, or money—didn’t make conversations unenjoyable or cause people to form bad impressions of the question-asker compared to more mundane questions. 

One caveat is to beware of what Brooks calls “boomerasking”: posing a question simply because you want to answer it yourself, like “How was your weekend?” when you have an amazing Saturday-night story to tell. Her 2025 study finds that these kinds of questions make us appear insincere, egocentric, and uninterested in our conversation partner.

5. We’re more hesitant to make jokes than we should be

Another 2017 study by Brooks and her colleagues finds that we think humour goes wrong more often than it actually does. “People underestimate how often attempts at humour go well - leavening the mood, drawing people closer, boosting perceptions of competence and status,” she writes.

When Brooks asked her students to record a conversation with “their favourite person in the world to talk to,” nearly all of those favourite people used a staple of the comedy toolkit: the call-back. Call-backs are references to a topic from earlier in the conversation or earlier in the relationship, a kind of marker of shared memory and often a little inside joke.

6. We underestimate the power of compliments

In a 2021 study, researchers asked students what they thought about giving random compliments to strangers, then actually sent them out to say nice things to others on campus. The students were nervous; they thought they wouldn’t be very good at giving compliments, and they worried that people might be bothered and uncomfortable.

In reality, their worries were overblown, and they also underestimated how good it felt to receive a compliment. While Brooks cautions against giving compliments on people’s physical appearance unless you know they’ll appreciate it, she highly recommends complimenting others on things you admire about them.

7. Apologies make us look good

One study by Brooks and her colleagues found that apologies make us seem more trustworthy. When people apologized for the rain (a “superfluous” apology) before asking a stranger to borrow their phone, 47% said yes - compared to 9% without an apology. In other experiments, they found that people who make these superfluous apologies for traffic or bad luck are also seen as more likable.

And in the realm of more substantive apologies, Brooks writes, doctors who apologize for their mistakes to patients and families are less likely to be sued. It turns out that taking responsibility is a good look.   

8. We think we understand each other more than we do

A 2022 study found that when someone asked an ambiguous question in a conversation, both people thought that its real meaning was understood 70% of the time or more, when they were actually on the same page only 44% of the time. Oddly, participants still overestimated their shared understanding when they were speaking totally different languages, believing that meaning could be inferred simply from tone of voice.

Brooks quotes playwright George Bernard Shaw in her book: “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” 

9. We have a hard time believing that people who disagree with us are actually listening

We often learn more from conversations than we expect to—and while the same thing is happening for other people, we don’t seem to realize it.

For example, if someone disagrees with us, we have a tendency to think they must not be listening very well. Even when people acknowledge and show respect for our perspective, and can articulate it clearly, we evaluate them as worse listeners if they disagree with our point of view compared to people who agree. 

And our assumptions about the other person affect how we act, too, Brooks says, potentially contributing to today’s social and political polarization. “If you think people are out to persuade you (rather than learn from you), you will behave in ways that are more likely to lead to conflict, which inhibits actual learning and escalates discord.”

10. Conversations rarely end when anyone wants them to

If you’re itching to get off the phone with a family member or worried that you’re taking up too much of someone’s time, you’re not alone. According to a 2021 study of 932 conversations, conversations don’t tend to end when both people want them to - or, for that matter, even when one person wants them to.

In general, we aren’t very aware of when our conversational partner wants to leave, and we underestimate how different the other person’s preference is from ours. “Ending conversations is a classic ‘coordination problem’ that humans are unable to solve because doing so requires information that they normally keep from each other,” the researchers conclude.

By Kira M. Newman | July 16, 2025

By Aundraea Stevens

Convenor of the Mental Health and Wellbeing Committee