Adelaide teacher Isabelle Roberts has been recognised for her decades-long service to Catholic education. Receiving the Catholic Education South Australia Award for Leadership Excellence for 2025, the Loreto College, Marryatville teacher’s storied 46-year long career wrapped up on a high note.
Roberts, who is currently the east Adelaide school’s religious education coordinator and liturgist, says she was excited to be given the award.
She said the award came shortly before her exit from the school at the end of the semester after 15 years as she begins to wind down her teaching career.
She has served in a variety of roles including as a music specialist, an inclusive education teacher, and a gifted and talented program facilitator.
“It’s a really fitting ending to acknowledge all the years of work I’ve done in teaching,” she told The Catholic Weekly.
Roberts said she liked to challenge herself as an educator, which has also seen her take on roles as a maths, STEM, and technology teacher but she has “always been” a religious education coordinator.
“I’ve always been the person in school that people can rely on to do the Scripture and theology because that’s my background,” she said.
“In the last 15 years, it’s been more focussed on just being the religious education coordinator and then the college liturgist.”
Roberts said one of the most rewarding moments was during her time in a disadvantaged school in South Australia where she helped refugees and other newly arrived children learn English and other life skills.
She said she remembered a young father was the parent of one of her prep students and when she asked him what he had done before coming to Australia, was shocked to learn he had grown up in a refugee camp.
“Before coming to Australia, he had never been to school,” she said.
“In that moment, I thought I’m so lucky, I’ve been handed education since I was a baby and here’s this man never having known it, never had a home, never had anything.”
Roberts said most of her duties in her current role revolve around the liturgy, including showing other teachers how they could use scripture better in their classrooms.
She said she also facilitated the liturgies for the school, even though she was based in Loreto’s junior school, arranging for students to take an active role in leading the singing and the prayers.
“I’ve developed this whole leadership aspect of liturgies,” she said.
“With kids these days, they don’t really go to Mass much, people don’t go to church as much and so it’s really important that the kids get that sense of church.”
Looking ahead, Roberts plans to spend more time with her children, grandchildren, and mother—but expects she will return to teaching as a substitute.