Principal Team Report

Yesterday, Thursday 25th May, was Public Education Day – a day to celebrate the awesome teachers and education support personnel who are making a significant difference in the lives of Australian children. Public schools are at the heart of our communities, helping to level the playing field, overcome disadvantage and achieve excellence for all. This ethos is certainly at the core of our work at Mullauna College, despite the current challenges of funding and staffing supply.

Stage 2 Master Plan Funding news

On the funding front, we have some very exciting news for our college community. On Wednesday, we received confirmation from the Minister for Education, Natalie Hutchins, that we will share in the School Upgrade Delivery Fund to the tune of $17.6 million, as promised by our local member Will Fowles at the previous state election. This will allow us to join with the Victorian Schools Building Authority (VSBA) to commence planning later this year on Stage 2 of our school's master plan, with the funding for the construction phase to be allocated in a future state budget. This will allow us to transition relatively quickly from our Stage 1 building (refer below for an update) to the next stage, hopefully putting all of our learning into practice!

Staffing update

As we prepare to move into exams and the commencement of Semester Two classes, we have had to make some staffing adjustments to allow us to cover all classes and roles.

Next week, we welcome back Lisa Larmour from her period of leave, and thank Adam Verrell for acting in her leadership role as the Head of Junior School.

Adam Verrell will now step into the Year 8 Coordination position, allowing Kathy Halpin to take on a full teaching load for the remainder of the year. Our thanks to Kathy for the fabulous work she has done leading and caring for our Year 8 cohorts for several years.

Teacher Professional Learning

One of the things we embrace as teachers is the constant challenge of keeping abreast of emerging issues and technologies.

At our most recent staff meeting, two of our staff, Maths and Science teacher, Darren Lam and our Specialist IT Technician, Joel Porter, introduced us to the latest technology that is causing quite a stir amongst educationalists, that is the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGTP.

At this Professional Learning session, we discussed the scope of these tools and their potential benefits as well as their risks and limitations. There is no doubt that after seeing some examples of how AI can create written responses to prompts, including images, we now understand that it has the potential to change the way we set learning activities and assessment tasks to ensure we can authenticate each student’s work as their own. This is no different in some ways to the challenges that we faced when students started using the internet to research a question and were able to ‘copy and paste’ already published information into their responses. The difference with AI is that it generates a response that hasn’t been published before and so our usual processes for checking and authenticating the work must also change.

As we develop our understanding, we will also develop new policies and practices around the use of these tools which will be communicated to students and parents in the very new future.

What’s been happening since the start of term?

The term started off with a very successful ANZAC day assembly run by our School Captains with our key speakers, College Principal Mr Harry Ruff reflecting on community and guest speaker Mr Keith Wolahan MP (Federal Member for Menzies) reflecting on his own time in the military and the sacrifices made by soldiers in wartime. We were fortunate to also have our brass music teacher Mr Peter Brodie play the last post and to conclude the ceremony, local bagpiper Mr Mick Ryan playing Amazing Grace. We are immensely proud of the behaviour, maturity and attitude of our students during these ceremonies which bring our community closer together. Thankyou also to the Audio Visual captains that manage the lights and sound for these events, they continuously do a great job.

Also, in our first week of term we had our whole-school athletics carnival. This is another opportunity for the students and teachers to come together to participate in and celebrate achievement in a broad range of athletic events. We were lucky with the weather and the day ran smoothly with some outstanding efforts by many students. A possible highlight for the day might have to be the 4 x 100m staff vs student relay. Led by Mr Ruff, the staff team took home a narrow win against some very competitive Year 12 students, which goes to show that age is no barrier to participation.

Open Night is another key event that occurred in the first weeks of term. This was our opportunity to share the elements that make Mullauna College the school of choice for the local community with our local community. For those parents and students investigating their options for secondary education in the area, they did not leave disappointed with their experience in meeting our staff and students and looking at our facilities and programs. The consistent feedback I was given by families throughout the night was that our staff are friendly, passionate and knowledgeable and that our students, whether leading a tour group or assisting in a learning space were true ambassadors of the college with their willingness to engage with parents and future students in a warm and confident manner and always with a smile.

Our new building project is progressing very well. With the roofing going up this week, we will be at lockup stage before we know it, with the project remaining on track for completion by December. We look forward to starting the new year in the new build.

What’s coming up over the remainder of the term?

With the academic semester concluding in just a few weeks, the focus for students in Years 9 – 11 is on the mid-year exams. Exam practice is an important step in developing the necessary skills to achieve success in VCE studies where examinations continue to be a major form of assessment.

The examination timetable has been sent to students and each exam appears as an event on Compass. Students are expected to attend all scheduled exams and should a student have an exam clash with another school event, such as Division Cross Country, their exam will be rescheduled to another time. We wish all our students the best for their upcoming exams.

Report Writing Day is on Friday 9 June. This student free day is to allow teachers to conclude their assessment marking (including exams) and provide any further feedback on published learning tasks.

Semester 1 reports will be published on the last day of term. This semester, we have made a change to our reporting format to remove the learning task feedback. As the learning task feedback is published throughout the semester for students and parents to view as soon as each task is completed, repeating the feedback on the semester report is unnecessary. We are currently undertaking a review of our reporting and feedback processes and will be seeking your feedback early term 3 in a parent survey we are developing.

Careers and Pathways

At Mullauna College, we regularly review our programs to improve and ensure we are catering to our students and our school community. We would like your feedback regarding your knowledge of our Careers and Pathways Program in the form of a survey. The survey will only take a few minutes and we appreciate your time and input. Nik Smith will facilitate the Survey links via Compass Newsfeed early next week. Thank you for your support of Mullauna College and our Careers and Pathways Program.

Year 10 work experience will take place in the days following the King's Birthday public holiday. This is generally a highlight for students as they investigate potential careers and pathways which assists their planning for VCE studies next year.

Our Semester 2 timetable commences on Tuesday 13th June. To balance out the length of each semester for VCE students, schools generally start their semester 2 timetable in the final weeks of the term. For students in Years 8 – 10, this will mean a change in electives and for Year 7 students, a change in their technology subject.

Update on the new VCE Vocational Major (VCE-VM) program

This year we are running a new VCE option called the Vocational Major (VM). The VCE-VM is a vocational and applied learning program within VCE designed to be completed over Years 11 and 12. It prepares students to move into apprenticeships, traineeships, further education and training, university (via non-ATAR pathways) or directly into the workforce.

With subjects such as literacy, foundation maths, personal development skills and work related skills in addition to undertaking a VET certificate (TAFE) and a day per week in the workplace for structured workplace learning, the students have an engaging and purposeful program.

This week, the students were interviewed to gain their feedback on the program to date and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive with an overall satisfaction rate of 8/10. They feel confident in their learning and could easily make connections between each subject which greatly assists their engagement with the program.

We are also fortunate to host a member of the Headstart program, Mr Michael Harvey. Headstart is an initiative of the Department of Education to support students who would benefit from starting a School Based Apprenticeship or Traineeship (SBAT). Michael is working directly with a number of our VCE-VM students to assist them to gain an apprenticeship which they will undertake on a part time basis whilst continuing their VCE-VM studies here at Mullauna. This is a clear win-win situation for our students.

We are very pleased with the start of this important new VCE program and with interest in this option growing rapidly amongst our students, we look forward to seeing the program continue to develop and meet the pathway needs for those students not intending to gain a scored VCE and ATAR for direct university entrance.

Managing teacher absences

A scan of media headlines over recent months has highlighted the ongoing issue that education, along with most other industries is continuing to face a shortage of qualified workers. Whilst we are in the very fortunate position of having all our teaching positions filled, including medium term contracts for staff on leave, we do however face an ongoing challenge filling short term (1-2 day) absences due to the unavailability of casual relief teachers.

Whilst every effort is made to cover every class with a replacement teacher, there are times where senior classes, where the teaching requires more specialisation, will not be covered and the students are directed to our VCE study centre to continue with their assigned work.

Michael Bray, Jacqui Brush & Harry Ruff

the MC Principal Team

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