Nigel's Natter

Hi HBPS Families,

It's been a wonderful term of learning and community spirit at HBPS this term. This newsletter is dedicated to sharing these celebrations with you all. 

Child safety and wellbeing

We are committed to providing an environment where students are safe and feel safe.

Our child safety framework explains how we support and maintain child safety and wellbeing at our school. It includes our:

• Child Safety and Wellbeing Policy

• Child Safety Reporting and Responding Obligations Procedures, and

• Child Safety Code of Conduct, which outlines acceptable and unacceptable behaviours for all staff and volunteers at our school.

Our students and families are important partners in providing a child safe environment. This newsletter reminder is one of the ways we ensure our school community is aware of:

• our commitment to child safety, and 
• how to provide feedback or raise child safety concerns.

If you have any concerns about child safety at any time, please contact the school office and ask to speak to Nigel or Krystina. Any child safety complaints or concerns are treated seriously. For more information about our school’s complaints process, see our Complaints Policy on the school website.

We also welcome your ideas on ways we can improve our approach to child safety and wellbeing. If you have any suggestions or comments please email the school email account. 

Leave

I am taking a period of Long Service Leave from Week 1 to Week 9 of next term. The following arrangements will be in place for the duration of my leave. 

• Acting Principal - Krystina Simpson
• Acting Assistant Principal - Elly Schwennesen

Our Preps have made so much progress.

Check this out for progress. In just 9 short weeks, our Preps have made outstanding progress in their knowledge of letters and sounds. This graph represents their ability to listen to a word and identify the first sound in the word.  

... and check out this handwriting.  So proud!

We've taken our curriculum planning to the next level. 

This level of detailed curriculum mapping means we can provide more transparent information to families about the learning happening at school. It also means our educators are spending more time thinking about how to ensure every child is supported to access the learning. 

We introduced Learning Overviews

We shared detailed Learning Overviews with our community so families know what their child is learning at school.    

We designed and built Progress Reports

Progress Reports share assessment data with our families. This level of academic transparency is rare - we are leading the way in this space. We know that our families are invested in their child's learning, and this information will help understand how their child is progressing. 

We also think that seeing the assessment data lined up next to attendance data will strengthen our message about the impact of being away from school.   

We have continued to support our team to be RESPONSIVE IN THEIR TEACHING. 

This means that teachers are considering how to provide different levels of challenge to each child, and how to respond in the moment so that all children are mastering the content being taught. 

One example of this is providing 3 levels of challenge for independent practice tasks. 

The Department of Education sent a Media Team to share our work. 

The teaching and learning that is happening at our school is being noticed. RIGHLY SO. Our team are doing an amazing job, and as a result, DET came to take a peak. 

We were asked to present to a large Principal Forum on how we have achieved such strong improvements in English. 

Following this presentation, we've been visited by schools from all over Geelong. It's been a pleasure sharing our work with educators.

My favourite slide from the entire presentation. No longer we will we accept the 'normal' school goals of 80% of kids will.... 

We invested lots of energy into our House System - and it came to life. House assemblies have been a blast and everyone loves house sport afternoons.  

We were one of 5 schools that organised a shared Curriculum Day for our teaching staff and Education Support staff. Our teachers engaged in a full day of learning about RESPONSIVE teaching, and you can see on the big screen our very own Mrs Munn and her class. Demonstrating EXPERT teaching. 

Our Education Support staff headed off to Armstrong Creek School to engage in a range of workshops, and the one and only Daryl Farnham presented on the POSWER OF POSITIVE PRAISE and how we leverage this at our school. 

6/5 students and staff excursion to Science Works. They had a great time, and the staff came back to school and raved about how fantastic our kids were for the day. Well behaved, respectful of others, calm, interested and more. Whoop whoop!

We made the call to staff and run Breakfast Club EVERY SINGLE DAY. We know that without breakfast, learning is harder than it should be. This is us SHOWING UP for our community. 

Movie Night was a great community night. Even though the sun stayed out longer than we would have liked, everyone had a fun time and we now know just how passionate Mrs Simpson is about a BBQ! 

We continued our school upgrades, focusing on the inside of the building. After spending lots of time and money getting our buildings restumped and waterproof and tidying up and ensuring the grounds are safe and inviting - we have finally kicked off with our internal upgrades. The admin area and staffroom were first on the list. AMAZING what a lick of paint and new carpet can do. 

THANKS goes to the entire team for their flexibility as we shuffled furniture around and worked from trestle tables for weeks (that felt like months!). 

I spent some time teaching in a variety of rooms. And, it was a delight. High levels of focus, challenging curriculum, active participation by all students and strong knowledge of our whole school routines.  

To wrap up - check out our kiddos loving life in Term 1. 

Hands on maths. 

Knowledge Unit tasks - showing our new knowledge. 

Working on our writing skills. 

Spending time with our Buddies.

Simple Machines Incursion.

Science Works - what a blast! 

So many small groups being delivered by our Wellbeing and Engagement team. Social skills, regulation, mateship, girls groups, boys groups, problem solving and more! 

See you at the front gate in Term 3. In the meantime, make sure you swing past and say morning to Mrs Simpson (acting principal for Term 2)! 

Nigel