From the Acting Principal

Dear Families,

Welcome back for Term 3! I hope the recent break provided you and your family with lots of opportunities to spend time with family and friends. It has been lovely starting to build relationships with the students, staff and families over the past couple of weeks. The students seem happy to be back at school, interacting with their friends and benefiting from the structure and engaging tasks the teachers have been working hard to prepare and present. I am looking forward to continuing to build those relationships and learning about how Ormond Primary School operates.

Enrolments for Prep 2024

July 26th marks the deadline for enrolment for 2025. The team at Ormond Primary School will start to confirm our grades for 2025 in the next few weeks and it is imperative that we have a full understanding of final numbers so we can recruit staff, prepare resources, etc. If you have a child who is due to begin school in 2025, please submit your enrolment form at your earliest convenience. Similarly, if you know another family who might need a reminder, please reach out so that they don’t miss out. The school office will be able to provide you with the paperwork and any further information you require on the process. 

Creating an Inspiring Environment

In my first week at Ormond Primary School, I visited every grade and presented them with a money plant or Pilea Peperomioides. Money plants are relatively easy to care for and, when they are very happy, they send out little ‘pups’ or baby plants. These can be then planted in a pot of their own and the cycle continues. Over the holidays, I purchased four plants and managed to extract 30 pups from three of them. The fourth plant, along with its pups, lives happily in the staffroom. 

Every student and staff member has been challenged to work together to ensure that all of our plants thrive this term. This involves getting to know the plants – how much light they need, how frequently do they like to be watered and how does the temperature in the room and the heater in the classroom impact them. At the end of the term, we will see how many pups we have growing in our pots and support other areas in the school whose plants may not be thriving. 

The message from this exercise is that we are a team and, while each of us is different and has different preferences, hobbies, interests, passions and strengths, we all have our place and can thrive within a supportive community.

NAPLAN

The final NAPLAN results for 2024 have been published and sent home with students in Years 3 and 5. Some of the highlights include:

• 96% of students in Year 3 achieved ‘Strong’ or ‘Exceeding’ in Writing and 0% of the students were assessed as ‘Needs Additional Support’
• 91% of students in Year 5 achieved ‘Strong’ or ‘Exceeding’ in Reading, over half of whom were assessed as ‘Exceeding’. This result is the strongest in our network of schools. 
• The growth the students in Year 5 made in Reading since they were in Year 3 is stronger than comparison schools (similar schools, network and state).

These outcomes are the result of the high focus on learning that our students have experienced since before they began school. Their first years at primary school ensured that foundational skills of literacy and numeracy were developed and consolidated so that they are now able to apply their learning in a testing environment. This is testament to the dedication and hard work of everybody in our community to ensure that the educational experiences of our students are tailored to their individual needs and focused on continuous improvement. 

It is also important to note, however, that NAPLAN is considered an assessment of a student’s performance on one day. Results can be skewed by lots of factors, including how the student is feeling that day, the interactions they have just had on the yard with 

their peers, the experiences they had the weekend prior, the excitement they might be feeling about the upcoming weekend, etc. Classroom teachers use NAPLAN data as one source of information in building each student’s progression point on their report. So, while we acknowledge the important role NAPLAN plays in providing information on how the school is performing in comparison to other schools in our network, state and across the country, on an individual level, the information it provides is limited and parents and carers are strongly encouraged to avoid seeing it as a full measure of their child. It’s also important to note that there is no NAPLAN measure of wellbeing, respect, generosity, attitude, etc., which forms a large part of our curriculum at Ormond Primary School. 

Parent / Caregiver / Guardian Opinion Survey

Our school will conduct the annual Parent/Caregiver/Guardian Opinion Survey offered by the Department of Education and is seeking your feedback. The survey is designed to assist schools in gaining an understanding of families’ perceptions of school climate, student behaviour, and student engagement. The survey is optional, but we encourage and appreciate your participation.

Our school will use the survey results, along with the feedback gained through the Attitudes to School Survey (students in Years 4-6) and the School Staff Survey, to assist in identifying areas for improvement and professional development needs in the school, and to target school planning and improvement strategies. 

The Parent/Caregiver/Guardian Opinion Survey will be open online from Monday 29 July to Friday 30 August 2024. All households are invited to participate in the survey using the link and the unique school PIN that will be distributed to all families via Compass next week. In order to make the survey as accessible to families as possible, we will also display QR codes around the school so you can provide your feedback while you wait for your child to be dismissed at the end of the school day. In 2023, we received 44 responses to the survey and are hoping for a much higher level of engagement in 2024. 

The survey will be conducted online, only takes 20 minutes to complete, and can be accessed at any convenient time on desktop computers, laptops, tablets or smartphones.

The online survey will be available in English and 10 other languages including Arabic, Greek, Hakha Chin, Hindi, Japanese, Punjabi, Simplified Chinese, Somali, Turkish, and Vietnamese. Resources are also available in additional languages to assist parents, caregivers and guardians who speak a language other than English at home. Please reach out to the school for survey guides in your language.

The results will be made available to the school late in Term 3 and, once the school improvement team have had an opportunity to collate and analyse the data, a summary will be provided to the Ormond Primary School community through our newsletter early in Term 4. 

Please email me if you have any questions or would like further information. 

TheirCare

The team at TheirCare have been busily building relationships with the students over the past few weeks, including a meeting with School Council on Wednesday evening this week. Watch out for some exciting news about upcoming events in the next few weeks. 

Regards,

Patrick Halpin