The 2025 Chronicle

their feelings, help them to express them and move forward with wisdom. That is a large part of what the counselling de partment does. STEER CHAMPION SCHOOL For the past four years Michaelhouse has been using STEER Tracking to identify hidden social-emotional risks that might otherwise go undetected, equipping our teachers and tutors to proactively target their support, and to measure impact. This pastoral assessment and tracking tool involves an online assessment, completed by the boys twice in each academic year. The data produced enables us to identify boys whose men tal health is at risk and to intervene proactively and appropri ately. Housemasters, Assistant Housemasters and some of the wider staff have been trained in how to use the data to support boys of concern. We have also made use of STEER’s framework for writing action plans to nudge boys towards helpful, healthy behaviour as they navigate their Michaelhouse journey. In 2024 Michaelhouse was named the International STEER School of the Year. This year we received further acknowledge ment by being selected as a STEER Champion School due to a consistently high-quality application of STEER over the past ac ademic year. Specifically, this was due to three excellent and ef ficient assessment rounds, along with outstanding implementa tion and the impact of student action plans and family signposts. COUNSELLING Counselling and pastoral care is an ongoing activity throughout the year at Michaelhouse. With 640 or so boys it is a demand ing role, and I am incredibly grateful to be assisted by Dr Rob Pluke in this work. Rob has been visiting the school as our con sulting psychologist every Wednesday morning now for the past three years. He has really added value with his oversight and input. Next year Rob will be with us for two days a week. We continue to be grateful to Mr Bryce Dekker, who saw close to 60 senior boys for career guidance over the course of 2025. In 2026 we will be supplementing this as we partner with Yenza, which provides an online set of career assessments and re sources. We look forward to this new collaboration. TUTOR GROUPS Each tutor received weekly emails providing ideas, material and resources around relevant topics to work through with the boys in their tutor groups during the year. This year saw several topics covered, including current issues of relevance to teenage boys. STUDENT PROGRAMMES During the year there are different programmes and interven tions to assist boys in their development and relationships. These included: • BODIES, BOUNDARIES AND BOARDING: A look at your rights and responsibilities as a boarder. This is for our E Blockers when they enter the school. • SEXY SMARTS: This day-long workshop on sex and sexuality forms part of the D Block Integrated Studies programme.

contain some of the worst excesses of such diseased mindsets. The case is often made that this rising tide of misogyny is a pushback against woke culture. But this doesn’t cut it. As Syed says, “The fact that women are no longer putting up with being underpaid, sexually harassed or raped doesn’t mean it is ‘un derstandable’ that young men feel angry enough to choke and traduce women, as ever more seem to do. This isn’t a reaction to feminism; it is pathetic, vile and cowardly.” ADOLESCENCE Back to Adolescence . The series opens with a 13-year-old boy being arrested over a violent crime, having spent hours alone in his bedroom in the vortex of online misogyny and porn. (Spoiler alert, he’s guilty.) “We thought he was safe,” his parents lament. “He was alone in his room.” But no child is alone when they are ensconced with a device and an internet connection. Without strict supervision, these devices aren’t tools. They’re toxins. As reviewer Tom Peck considers, the series is “about teenage boys, pornography, Andrew Tate and toxic masculinity. It’s about parents, and indeed police officers, simply not understanding the transformed world in which their adolescent children live. Being a teenager is the same as it ever was, but a teenager armed with a smartphone is simply a different species, living in a different jungle to the one his or her parents knew.” GET LOUD Of course, a background hum is not the same as murder. Yet it all contributes to a culture where harassment and abuse of females becomes normal or acceptable. We know this better as rape culture. The gender violence pyramid clearly illustrates how sexist thoughts burgeon into abusive comments. In turn such comments, if unchecked, allow for misogynistic behaviours, cre ating a hostile environment for women – an environment where rape and femicide are the top of a very large iceberg. If you are a man it’s time to speak out and speak out loudly. Chal lenge those thoughts, words and actions that demean women. If you are a male teacher you are perfectly placed to push back. Richard Reeves, who wrote Of Boys and Men , stated, “The best answer to Andrew Tate is not to be found in the far reaches of the internet. It is found at the front of our classrooms.” Australian Broadcasting Corporation presenter Virginia Trio li comments in an opinion piece, “…when I think of male role models there are only an unchanging few. And if men, all kinds of men, aren’t storming the field where their bewildered boys are gathered and offering them other ways of being a man, then they’ve ceded the ground to noisy monsters like Tate. There are great male role models teaching boys ways of being independent, healthy and well-connected men. But my point here is that they have to find a way to be loud about it.” So, men, I am putting this on you. Speak out at home, speak out around the braai. Speak out in church, in school and in the locker room. Speak out on the side of the sports field and on social media. But most of all, speak out to your son. At Michaelhouse we believe in guiding and showing boys how to be a man. This happens day by day in the classroom, week by week in Chapel, assembly, House Business and tutor groups. It also happens when we help boys access and own

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