Another Slovak Educational Leadership conference over for another year. This year saw a clear focus on authenticity in education at the level of pedagogy, curriculum choices and policy making. AI featured heavily, both in terms of opportunities and risk with a clear leaning into training and safe useage, at school and higher ed level. Opportunities for service, volunteering and collaborative learning were warmly endorsed as a means not only of developing character but of providing a wider cultural schema. Spirituality, too, understood as an openness to transcendence but also a humble awareness of finitude, was an area of interest, offering a richer avenue to real tolerance and inclusivity than merely ‘rights’ language. Opportunities were explored to encounter ‘the other’, to be accompanied by powerful role models, to learn through inquiry and allow truth to reveal itself. Embedding values in organisations, and building on them, as against retrofitting, were all welcomed. Thanks go as always to the superb contributors, and to the institutions from which they came as well as the good people of Bardejov