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 and 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, assume responsibility for their learning, and 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.

Our Founders’ values – integrity, learning, community, and effort – forged 105 years ago remain true to PLC Perth today. 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 tertiary education pathways – the world-recognized International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma program, the WA Certificate of Education (WACE), 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 well-being center – the PLC Lighthouse – delivers the health and well-being 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 well-being spaces, students are encouraged to use them 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 values of the individual.
• An enduring legacy of values such as integrity, learning, community, and effort.
• A culture of learning for life and spiritual inquiry 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 realize 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 community members 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 that are modeled every day. Integrity and a strong sense of social justice are particularly demonstrated through a commitment to celebrating diversity, including reconciliation for indigenous peoples of Australia and striving for equal opportunities for women.

We learn and explore intellectual challenges and are inspired to value learning as inquirers, thinkers, risk-takers, communicators, and self-reflection. Students develop an understanding of themselves, their community, and the world around them through a balance of academic, social, cultural, and spiritual inquiry 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 recognize everyone’s value and contributions. The value of belonging to a community accepts rights and responsibilities and recognizes that with privilege comes an individual and collective responsibility for the common good.

We recognize 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.