Principal's Message

Headlines - Please Note

We encourage you to read this entire newsletter as lots of effort has been put into its production.  Here are the most urgent and important details to read in this edition (not just on this first page):

1. Parent Contributions Support (This Page)
2. Book Week (Learning Page)
3. Bullying - No Way! (Wellbeing Page)
4. Class Celebrations and Updates/Reminders

Principal's Message

Hello families and friends of SMPS. Welcome to the start of Week 5 of a nine-week term. Time flies when you are having fun. 

I was on a school review last week (and have one more day to attend this coming week). It is at a high school so the context is quite different, but I do get to learn what makes another school tick. Coupled with this, I was the Acting Senior Education Improvement Leader for close to a month last term so my perspective is certainly widening. I believe these experiences make me well-qualified to pass judgement on the quality of SMPS in comparison to other schools. 

Please note that we are not in competition with others schools - they are our brothers and sisters in a combined endeavour to enhance the lives of young ones and to improve society more generally. However, it would be naive of me to ignore how schools operate and not bring those lessons back to SMPS to improve our service delivery.

The upshot of my journey is that SMPS is a very special place with excellent things happening. We are not perfect by any stretch and we always need to search for the next thing to improve. But, we are very, very good at many things. 

I have some items below that show (warts and all) our positive and challenging traits. Our goal is to bring the best we can to the students within the resources at our disposal. 

Parent Contributions

We are tracking at about 80% return from parents in terms of financial contributions. We respect and appreciate parent choice and we are so appreciative of your help in shelling out for supplies and extra support financially where you can. 

If you are able to afford parent contributions, I encourage to to do so. An example of the extra boost we get (beyond what we could if no contributions were made) is our First Aid Officer (Miss Jo). Her wage is directly tied to your financial contribution. No contribution = no Jo. 

Over the course of the year, Jo attends directly to your child's health and safety by being there when they fall sick or are injured. She also takes care of medical-related issues such as allergies and asthma. She contacts you to check on health and wellbeing issues and communicates via Compass as required. I have been a parent of school children in the past and would have been absolutely thrilled if I could contribute financially to such a service. I hope you see things in the same way.

Anyone experiencing financial difficulty with anything related to school is strongly encouraged to contact Colin (our Business Manager) for a supportive chat.

Thanks to all parents who are able to contribute who make services like First Aid Jo possible. State funding alone could not make this occur.  I assume most parents want icing on the cake for their children if they are able. 

Front Forecourt Surface

I am dissatisfied with the state of the front forecourt. I know that I am not alone in my dissatisfaction. It looks disgraceful and is pooling with water on bare earth. Not great. We want better for our children but mid-winter is proving to be challenging for this to be remediated. We have a plan, but can't get to it until the weather turns and we can get the crowd off the surface. This will have to wait till summer, unfortunately.

As principal, I would rather our children play on 'real' grass and not on an artificial surface. Many of our children come from apartments and having another thing that is 'man made' does not inspire them. We tried to 'save' the grass last summer with revamps to our irrigation system, and a re-seeding effort. This worked to a degree, but clearly has failed us now in the depths of winter. I want to give it one last shot this summer before potentially capitulating to the artificial surface option. 

The artificial surface would have students on a topping that gets very hot in spring, summer and autumn on warmer days. 

Our plan is to consult experts in the field of turf management and conduct a review of irrigation, drainage, turf selection and remediation with the view to conducting the work over the coming summer to have a lovely, new surface ready for the kids in 2026. We can't do much until then so I ask for patience in the meantime. I am sorry that we have not been successful so far - but we will get there.

Bike Shed

I am also dissatisfied with our bike shed. It can tend towards being untidy. We are getting some major works done with the waterproofing of the bike shed. Before doing more work with the bike shed, the waterproofing will be the first port-of-call. The issues in the shed are not something stopping children being safe or playing happily (like the forecourt) so it is less urgent. I just wanted the community to know that improvements of the infrastructure are being done and we will attend to the bike shed more readily once this work is completed. 

NAPLAN Updates

Our Year 3 Reading data is represented in the graphic below. The results are exceptionally strong. This is the first cohort who have gone through the school with our set curriculum and pedagogy model. This graph pits the SMPS (School) against National and State outcomes in 2025 NAPLAN Reading Year 3. 

I appreciate not all readers will be familiar with the graphing conventions used for plotting NAPLAN, but the short story is that the average Year 3 SMPS student is exceeding the outcomes of the highest 90 percent of National and State students. It breaks it down further into Boys, Girls and Language Backgrounds Other Than English, but you can get the picture from the first section of the graph (labelled "All"). Orange is SMPS.

I mentioned last week that the word "Wow" comes to mind when looking at SMPS outcomes in high stakes testing.

Book Week Parade

Remember that this Friday is our Book Week Parade. We will be doing literature-based work all week, but the Parade is our culmination celebration that you are all invited to in the gym on the Friday morning. Keep the outfits simple - and don't spend much/any money. Innocent fun is the name of the game - not outdoing the next kid with extravagant costuming. 

Uniform Spot Check

Our children look better than any other school in their uniform - sharp, neat and tidy. This adds to the seriousness that we treat education and really helps identify our children when we mix in our local community. There is a safety and image practicality around having a sharp uniform.

Over the coming three weeks, we will conduct our usual "Uniform Blitz" to ensure compliance to the standard. This is just a heads-up to ensure you know what we are doing at the class and school level to support compliance.