From the Principal

Dear BMGS Families,

Term 3 Begins

Welcome back to Term 3, everyone. We began our term with a special moment in our Senior School Assembly, marking a significant milestone for our Year 12 students: their very last ‘first day of term’ at BMGS. As they step into their final weeks of school, this term will be one of both celebration and preparation. We will walk with them through their trial exams, support them as they navigate this final chapter, and then send them into the world as prepared, capable and courageous young people.

Term 3 has certainly felt like it launched with what could only be described as a Le Mans start — fast, full throttle and packed with activity. In just the first week, we’ve had ISA Sport fixtures, our Junior School Arts Experience, the arrival of our visitors from Nagoya, Japan, a vibrant P&F meeting, an information evening hosted by Charles Sturt University, subject selection work for our Year 8 students, the Stage 3 Canberra trip, and so much more. This list doesn’t even include the many student opportunities that took place during the holidays, from HSC study sessions to snowshoe expeditions and much more.

On a personal note, I’ve been reading a great deal lately about the mental health benefits of practising gratitude — something I’ll write more fully about in upcoming newsletters. But in short, the science is clear: gratitude matters. Not just for the big things, but for the small, quiet moments too. So as the term unfolds, I encourage us all to stop, breathe, and notice the things we’re grateful for — even something as simple as five quiet minutes and a warm cup of coffee.

At the end of the break, our teaching staff gathered for our annual Staff Conference — a time for professional learning, collaboration, and inspiration. This year, we were incredibly fortunate to be joined (virtually and in person) by three globally recognised thought-leaders in education, who were exclusively available to BMGS staff as part of our commitment to educational excellence and innovation:

Dr Thom Markham is a pioneer of project-based learning and the founder of PBL Global. His work focuses on designing schools that foster deeper learning, character growth, and real-world problem-solving.
Jean Stiles, a leading voice in educational innovation, served as the Founding Director of Mount Vernon Ventures in the United States, helping schools around the world reimagine teaching and learning through human-centred design.
Louie Montoya, from Stanford University’s d.school in California, is a key contributor to helping schools build cultures of trust, equity, and creativity.

Their insights, provocations and encouragement were deeply affirming for our teaching team. They served as a potent reminder that the work we are doing here at BMGS is not only contemporary and relevant but, in many ways, leading the way.

Policies and Procedures

Over the past few weeks, we’ve also been working with staff to review and update several of our school policies and procedures. These sessions have been incredibly valuable, helping staff feel confident in the processes we follow and reinforcing that these documents exist not as red tape, but as a foundation for safe, respectful, and well-functioning working relationships. They’re there to ensure our school remains a place where everyone is treated with care and professionalism.

In that same spirit, I’d like to begin a similar process with our parent community this semester. Over the coming weeks, I’ll highlight a small number of key policies in our newsletter — not in response to any particular concern, but simply to ensure that all families are also aware of their existence, and to explain how they guide our decisions and actions. The first of these is our Parent Code of Conduct, which can be found on Schoolbox. I encourage you to take a moment to read it. It reflects the values we all share and supports the respectful, collaborative relationships that help our school thrive.

This week’s newsletter also includes my reflections on the recent media coverage around NAPLAN and some thoughts on what we can take from the latest data. I hope you find it both encouraging and thought-provoking, as well as a little confronting.

Wishing every student, family and staff member a purposeful and positive Term 3. There is much to look forward to — and much to be thankful for.

Title: Is the System Failing Our Children — Or Are We Asking the Wrong Questions?

Another set of NAPLAN results, another outcry.

You may have noticed in the media over recent days that NAPLAN results have created some concerns. The ABC reported that one in three students are still not meeting literacy and numeracy benchmarks. At the same time, The Australian highlighted that one in ten children “need additional support to progress satisfactorily”. The Sydney Morning Herald concluded that the 2025 NAPLAN results will escalate the battle between Federal Education Minister Jason Clare and his State counterparts.

The most recent data paints a familiar — and troubling — picture: a steady national decline in foundational literacy and numeracy outcomes, particularly in writing. Understandably, this has prompted public concern. But as I read the headlines and scroll through the commentary, I can’t help but notice a familiar pattern: blame.

Blame the teachers. Blame the lounges and beanbags. Blame “modern methods.” Blame inquiry learning. Blame Project-based Learning (PBL). Blame staffing shortages. Blame, blame, blame!

But is that really where our focus should lie?

I have seen suggestions this week that the decline in student outcomes is the result of classrooms that look “too comfortable” — that somehow the presence of soft furniture is the reason eight-year-olds are struggling to construct a sentence. These arguments — while perhaps well-intentioned — reduce the issue to aesthetics rather than substance. These commentators yearn for a return to “yesteryear,” a time when order was presumed to equal rigour, and rigour was often confused with rigidity.

But I want to pose a different question: what if our students aren’t failing the system — what if the system is failing our students?

Because our children are no less capable than those of past generations, and our teachers are not less skilled or less committed — in fact, the demands placed on them have never been higher. So perhaps we need to look beyond the classroom walls and ask: what else has changed?

Some uncomfortable truths:

Parental reading rates are in decline: According to a 2022 ABS survey, only 32% of parents read to their children daily, down from 45% just a decade ago. And children who are read to regularly at home perform significantly better in literacy tasks.
Screen time has exploded: A 2023 Growing Up in Australia study found that children aged 6–13 now average 3.5 hours of screen time per day outside of school, much of it passive and entertainment-based. This often replaces unstructured play, reading, or conversation, which are vital activities essential for developing thinking, learning and reasoning capacity.
Reading and writing for pleasure is diminishing: The most recent Australian Children’s Literacy Behaviour Report shows that less than 35% of children aged 8–14 report reading for enjoyment daily, and even fewer write outside of school. This is in sharp contrast to the habits of earlier generations.

What are we modelling?

This week, I was genuinely shocked when speaking with Junior School teachers from other schools and hearing that students as young as year 3 — just eight years old — were watching the series Squid Game. I have written about this before, and I am sure that our school is not immune to this either.

For context, Squid Game is rated MA15+ in Australia and features extreme violence, psychological distress, and mature themes including desperation, suicide, and exploitation. It is intentionally confronting — designed for adults. Exposure at such a young age isn’t just “too much, too soon” — it can profoundly affect a child’s sense of safety, empathy, and trust.

One teacher I spoke to from a school in the Northern Beaches told me that he observed his Junior School students role-playing scenes from Squid Game - scenes where the characters were murdered while playing children’s games.

Whether or not this is widespread, the fact that it’s happening at all is telling and deeply concerning. Suppose our children’s imaginative world is being shaped more by algorithm-driven content than by storybooks, conversation, or meaningful dialogue. What chance does NAPLAN really have to provide the necessary insights that it was designed to discover?

We have to ask not just how our students are learning, but what they’re immersed in — at home, online, and on the broader culture. If we want strong outcomes in literacy and numeracy, I contend that we cannot rely solely on schools as the sole agents of change.

A quick word on NAPLAN itself

At Blue Mountains Grammar School, our students again performed well in this year’s NAPLAN assessments — a credit to our dedicated staff and committed families. However, even as we celebrate strong results, I would like to offer a word of caution.

NAPLAN was never designed to rank schools.

Long before NAPLAN — back in the era of the NSW Basic Skills Test — these assessments were intended to be diagnostic. A snapshot. A check-in to see how students were progressing in foundational skills, so that teachers could tailor their instruction and intervene where necessary to ensure student learning didn’t stall. It was designed to provide a standard scale for assessing student performance and identifying areas of strength and weakness.

Unfortunately, in recent years, NAPLAN data has too often been weaponised — used to compare schools, judge cohorts, and feed league tables that do little more than amplify anxiety. When governments, media outlets, and school systems use this data to sort and rank, they add an unnecessary and harmful layer of pressure to our youngest learners. And worse still, they risk turning assessment into something students fear, rather than a tool that helps teachers nurture growth and development.

Let’s get serious about the real challenge

The truth is: The system is still built on outdated assumptions about standardised progression. Assessment frameworks are often divorced from real-world applications. And pedagogical innovation is frequently stifled by bureaucratic inertia.

Research and discovery in the field of neuroscience are also critical for our learners. Given what neuroscience has revealed over the past two decades about how the brain develops and how learning occurs — particularly about attention, emotion, memory, and stress — it would be remiss of us to ignore these findings. We now know that enriched, safe, and emotionally attuned environments are not just beneficial but essential for effective learning.

The answer is not nostalgia. Nor is it to retreat to a system that served a different time and a different body of knowledge. Instead, we need to evolve — courageously and intelligently — in ways that reflect what we now know about how young people grow, learn, and thrive.

I would like to stop blaming the furniture.

I would prefer to begin redesigning the system.

We need to ask how we support parents, how we inspire readers, how we build attention spans, and how we reconnect young people to joy, meaning and purpose in their learning.

Because if we want better results, we’ll need more than just better tests.

We’ll need a better conversation.

Warm regards

Steven Coote

Principal

This document has been reviewed for spelling and grammar. Please note that as such, it may identify some content as being generated by AI.