Principal Report

Dear PVNPS Community,

Please stay tuned as I have a lot to say this week.

Firstly, I would like to inform the community that our wonderful Janeitta, in our office reception area, will not be returning in 2024 to PVNPS. Oh boy, what amazing shoes to fill... Janeitta, who is currently enjoying a lovely cruise, has decided to retire and become a lady of leisure. It would be lovely if you could send her off with your well wishes at the end of the year.

Secondly, at PVNPS we encourage every student to reach for the stars, embracing a culture of a growth mindset and being aware that making mistakes is part of the learning journey. We want all our students to strive in both academic and personal growth. 

We need to celebrate the achievements that come from hard work, determination, and a commitment to pushing boundaries. Our teachers have shown great passion for learning themselves as we implement a new evidence-based maths instructional model for maths lessons. These lessons have increased our student dispositions within maths and their engagement has been increased. 

It is important that you are aware of what we are achieving at PVNPS so that together we elevate our school community to new heights. We do this in partnership. I wanted to especially thank the parents who attended the parent discussion group. It was great to hear directly about some improvements that we can investigate to improve clearer communication about student learning and also in regard to our homework for students.

We are currently evaluating our 2023 Annual implementation Plan (AIP) which sets out our goals and targets for whole school improvement and then we begin to write our 2024 AIP. We will share our goals and targets with you as soon as we have completed them. 

Our targets within our learning have also met our expectations and I congratulate Ms McAlister and Ms Elizabeth for overseeing these improvements. Students have made significant growth within reading, especially within our tutoring program. Home reading has also excelled with new texts being purchased as these are far more engaging.

We have worked extremely hard to improve our wellbeing of all students and cater for their various diverse needs. Our whole school positive behaviour matrix has shown to have made a huge difference and now we have common language across the school.  We still have not met all our goals in this space as we have more work to do with further developing students ability to understand their feelings and emotions and learn strategies in responding to them. Mr Gagliardi and the whole leadership team have also undertaken a great deal of professional learning in this field which will continue into 2024.

Our school council have continued to meet and work towards greater improvements for the whole school. School Council have assisted the school to achieve some AIP goals; with their support in donating some of their fundraising monies to our main priorities such as home readers and STEM.   The students have thoroughly enjoyed the bots and coding activities. 

School Council members often give up their time not only for the meetings but also for organising special events. I would like to thank them for their amazing dedication to making PVNPS an even better place for our community. 

We have parents doing extra things like:

• coming in on the weekend to do some gardening and other tasks.
• organising Men’s shed to get some new benches and planters for our school
• attending prep transition to sell second hand uniform
• organising food trucks for our concert
• attending working bees and BBQs
• organising and/ or volunteering at our community breakfast 

Have a great weekend and fingers crossed that the weather is 'just right' for our concert next Friday!