First Day of Term 1 – Blackwood Primary School (1981)

Blackwood Primary School opened for the first term of the 1981 school year with 312 students enrolled from Reception to Year 7 and a teaching staff of thirteen under Principal Lenora Farquhar, then beginning her third year in the role. The school stood on its site on Shepherds Hill Road, where the original timber schoolhouse had long since been joined by the red-brick classroom wing and assembly hall added in 1957.

Returning students gathered in the yard before the morning bell, most of them in the school's gold polo shirts, and moved into the classrooms of their new year levels. The term opened with a whole-school assembly in the hall. Farquhar welcomed students and families, introduced the year's teaching staff, and set out the school's expectations for conduct, punctuality and care of the grounds.

The new Reception intake was the day's largest undertaking. Forty-one children began their formal schooling, divided between two Reception classes, nearly all of them brought to the classroom door by a parent. Some parents stayed through the first hour at the teachers' invitation; others left at the bell. The Reception teachers spent the day on the foundations of school life: names and bag hooks, the bell and the lines, the toilets and the drinking taps, where to sit at lunch, and how to ask for help.

For the older year levels, the first day was given over to organisation rather than instruction. Teachers issued exercise books and timetables, assigned desks and classroom monitors, and introduced the term's integrated theme, the approach Farquhar had brought to the school, under which literacy, social studies and art were taught around a single shared topic.

The grounds had been readied over the last week of the holidays by Murray Hartley, the school's groundskeeper. The day closed at the afternoon bell. Reception children were collected from their classrooms, and the older students were released to walk, ride or catch the bus home. No incidents were recorded.