Faith Life & Learning and Teaching News

FAITH LIFE 

End of Year Mass

With only four weeks left of the school year, we warmly invite you to join us for our End of Year Mass. This special celebration will give us the opportunity to reflect on and celebrate the year we have shared together, to farewell our Year 6 students, and to acknowledge families and teachers who will be leaving. We will also take this moment to announce our school leaders for 2026.  We would love to see you there!

Leadership Day: Thursday 14th November

We were fortunate to hold our leadership day offsite at the Catholic Leadership Centre in West Melbourne, which provided the Leadership Team, Kaylene, Erin, Cath, Kim, Sue, Rosie, Lisa and Michael,  with dedicated time to annually write our Annual Action Plan.   Using our analysis of current school data, we identified priorities and strategies to strengthen student learning outcomes and staff growth. This collaborative process ensures our planning is evidence-based, targeted, and aligned with our school’s vision and the MACS Vision for Instruction for continuous improvement.

We also spent time refining our new Sacred Heart Purpose, Vision, and Mission statements, which the RE team has guided the staff in shaping and developing into a coherent framework. We look forward to officially launching these statements in 2026 with our school community.

New Melbourne Religious Education Curriculum: 

Sacred Heart are part of the implementation of the new Religious Education curriculum, Proclaim Christ JesusI 

On Monday I  attended a professional learning session at the Catholic Leadership Centre with Bree to support our Prep teachers as they work with the draft units of work and teaching and learning sequences. With the trial now entering its second year, our school has been invited to join this group to begin our understanding of the new curriculum and strengthen its implementation practices.

 I will be working closely with our Prep educators for 2026, Bree and Eleanor, through regular collaborative planning, modelling and co-teaching, classroom visits, and ongoing feedback to build their confidence, content knowledge and to ensure that Religious Education is implemented with fidelity.

I will be able to take our progress back to our Trial-based Learning Teams, which are professional communities of teachers and Religious Education Leaders from St Mary MacKillop, Keilor Downs and St Mary’s in Alexandra.  We will also work alongside the MACS Implementation Lead who will meet regularly with all 40 other Catholic schools across Melbourne.

We will share our progress with our team on a regular basis - discussing the  evidence-based strategies that we are using to support the high-quality content that we will use, that has been worked on by a team of experts across the field of Catholic Education. 

MACS Schools - Naplan Data 

As we celebrated our NAPLAN success at Sacred Heart this year, MACS (Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools) also highlighted this achievement last Thursday at our School Improvement Network.

Catholic schools across Melbourne outperformed the Victorian state proficiency average in numeracy, reading and writing across all year levels.

Prep Transition:

Our 2026 Prep teachers, Bree and Eleanor, welcomed the students for three successful transition sessions this term. These sessions provided an opportunity to welcome new families and connect with existing families, helping everyone feel part of the Sacred Heart community. 

During their final session on Thursday, the students met their Year 5 buddies (currently Year 4), and Kaylene and Erin facilitated an informative session for parents to support a smooth start to Prep in 2026.