The whole Mansfield Steiner School community send our heartfelt congratulations to 2025’s year 12 students that all achieved their IB Diplomas.

Each received ATAR conversions over 70.

You will head into your next adventures near and far with well-rounded skills and well-aware of many ways that life here in our town intersects with lives in other places.

The questions these year 12s posed themselves for their research explorations across all subject areas will no doubt pop up again in different forms.

Willow Mathews' extended research essay into where responsibility lies for tides turning on the Eastern Front during World War Two and Molly Diepeveen’s into shifts within young adult dystopian fiction post-pandemic through Australian author Karen Comer’s Grace Notes connect with areas of long-held interest for them both.

History and Literature are likely to feature in their respective future university studies and definitely their individual pursuits.

Oscar Johnston’s art exhibition Welcome to Pulpa was a multi-medium construction of a not-so-distant hypothetical nation.

This was one of what are sure to be many ways of playing out a thought experiment about our world that he will continue to hash out via different creative means.

In her year’s reflection, Ella Crathern shared that she particularly appreciated this chance to make her own questions with her own thesis statements and arguments to critically engage with ideas.

She took many opportunities to reflect on contemporary culture, for example through her anthropology investigation into young women’s perceptions of how makeup effects them, bringing the broader implications of her findings implicitly into her artwork and textual analysis.

When it came time to combine ideas in Theory of Knowledge, comparing the approaches of different disciplines to case studies they found intriguing, these year 12s asked questions like:

How do we know claims about re-creating the dire wolf are legitimate? (Ecology and Genetics - Oscar)

How important is it that someone teaching you a backflip has done a backflip themselves? (Biomechanics & Sport Psychology - Molly)

How do our ethics influence historical investigations into society’s past wrongdoings? (History/Human Sciences – Ella and Willow)

Such ethical dilemmas included perceptions of the Armenian Genocide and reflections on the Nuremburg trials.

The twists and turns you all took in your imagining and reasoning brought you to many good answers and many persistent mysteries.

Both are great results.

To our most recent Mansfield Steiner IB Diploma Graduates, may you each find many teachers and peers to keep your learning alive forever into the future.