Presbyterian Ladies' College, Perth

Presbyterian Ladies’ College 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.

At PLC, every girl is given the opportunity to:

• Develop an appreciation of intellectual challenge and a love of lifelong learning
• Gain the confidence to question, challenge and be creative
• Give and receive warmth and human understanding
• Belong to a community in which to experience the beauty and joy of life itself.

PLC students are encouraged to become critical and compassionate thinkers, to assume responsibility for their own learning and to be informed and engaged participants in local and global issues. Underlying these precepts is the conviction that women can, and should, make a difference in the world. At PLC we measure our achievements through theirs.

PLC Perth is more than a School. When your daughter joins us, your entire family becomes a member of a community rich in history, strong in its commitment to the values of compassion and respect, dedicated to intellectual challenge and inquiry and which has a culture of participation, resilience and courage.

These values – integrity, learning, community and effort – forged 105 years ago by our Founders, remain true to PLC Perth today as we educate girls to be global citizens and empower them to lead a principled life.

PLC Perth is the only girls’ school in Western Australia to offer three pathways to tertiary education – the world-recognised International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma programme, the WA Certificate of Education (WACE) pathway and the vocational education pathway.

In our Junior School our IB Primary Years Programme is a curriculum and pedagogy that focuses on developing the whole child – academically and social-emotionally.

Our world-class wellbeing centre – the PLC Lighthouse – delivers the health and wellbeing curriculum in a state-of-the-art facility where the focus is on feeling good, functioning well and doing good for others. With its gymnasium, circuit and movement rooms and wellbeing spaces, students are encouraged to use these spaces before and after school, during study and lunch breaks.

Presbyterian Ladies’ College is a Uniting Church School committed to an excellent well-rounded educational experience that gives every girl confidence and empowers her to lead a principled life and make an active contribution to the Community.

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.

Vision: Providing opportunities for generations of girls to discover their uniqueness and have the courage to strive to live by their convictions and realise their potential.

PLC is a values-based community. Staff, students and parents subscribe to our values upon becoming members of the College. These values provide the compass by which members of the community come together to support one another and be of service to others.

Taken together, our values create an enabling environment to meet the School’s Statement of Purpose:  Presbyterian Ladies’ College is a Uniting Church School committed to an excellent well-rounded educational experience that gives every girl confidence and empowers her to lead a principled life and make an active contribution towards the community.

Strong ethical values make truth, compassion, respect and moral courage highly-valued attitudes which are modeled every day. Integrity and a strong sense of social justice is particularly demonstrated through a commitment to celebrating diversity including reconciliation for indigenous peoples of Australia and striving for equal opportunities for women.

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.

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.

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.