Principal's Report

 Welcome to our first newsletter for 2025! I would like to extend a warm welcome to all of our students and families as we begin another great year at Lilydale Heights College. 

I would also like to give a special welcome to our new Year 7 students as they begin their journey at Lilydale Heights College. This year, we are thrilled to welcome 195 Year 7 students, and we are eager to see all that they will achieve. We are also delighted to have new students joining us across Years 8 to 11 and look forward to seeing them thrive as part of our school community.

We are also welcoming a number of new and returning staff who are joining us this year at Lilydale Heights College. As we continue to grow as a school, it is wonderful that we are able to increase the number of amazing staff that we have here to support our students.

New & Returning staff:

We have had a fantastic and positive start to the year for both students and staff. As we began the year, we shared with our College community our ongoing commitment to our vision of Maximising learning growth to ensure all students can thrive. To bring this vision to life, we are prioritising two key areas:

First, we are enhancing the way we create a stimulating learning environment for our students. This involves ensuring that classroom lessons are engaging, relevant, supportive and tailored for students so they are able to successfully achieve learning growth. 

Secondly, we are strengthening student voice and agency. We are exploring new ways for students to actively participate in their learning and play a greater role in shaping their experiences at Lilydale Heights College. A major initiative supporting this is the introduction of Learning Pathways, which families can learn more about later in this newsletter. 

It has also been a busy start to the year with a range of exciting activities taking place to support student learning and wellbeing. Some of these have included:

• Year 7 camp. This was a real highlight with students demonstrating the power of working together, taking on challenges, resilience and friendship. Our Peer Support students also visited the camp to connect with our Year 7’s and build strong relationships that will continue throughout the year.

• Our Year 12’s attended their 3-day study camp and also received their new Year 12 jackets. This is the first year that we have moved to jackets for our Year 12’s and they all look amazing. 

• Our Whole School Assembly took place on Monday 3 February to welcome our Year 7 students, to set our focus for 2025 and to present our College Leaders with their badges. 

• Our SELF classes have begun with a focus on ensuring that LHC is a safe learning space for all. Students in Year 7-12 have been learning about bullying, harassment and discrimination as well has how to be a positive upstander. Staff have been introduced to the Resilience Project which will inform our support of students throughout the year. 

• Production auditions – a large number of students have taken part in the audition process for our College Production of Chicago: Teen Edition with the final cast list being revealed last week!

• Instrumental Music trials have taken place for all Year 7 students. This has allowed students to experience a range of instruments on offer to help them decide if they would like to join the Music Program. This has been a successful initiative with a large number of Year 7 students opting to join the Music Program in 2025.

• Our teachers have started on their Action Learning Tasks (ALT) for Term 1. The aim of this ALT is to maximise learning growth by ensuring the consistent implementation of the MAPS instructional model. Our teachers are working collaboratively to delve deeper into their use of MAPS to provide a stimulating learning environment for students. 

• We recently had the pleasure of welcoming students and staff from our sister school, Ohta Daiichi High School. Some of us were lucky enough to travel to Japan last year on our school tour and visit Ohta Daiichi High School. It was wonderful to see the connections and experiences our sister school students had with our LHC students. It was a great few days with many new experiences. You can see some photos from Ohta Daiichi High School’s visit within this newsletter and on our socials. A heartfelt thank you to our homestay families for opening their homes and providing our Japanese guests with a true Australian family experience. 

• School Tours have started for 2025 with all tours for Term 1 booking out!  As a result, we have had to increase our tour numbers to cater to family interest. It is wonderful to see so many families interested in seeing and hearing what is happening at LHC. I am very proud of how our prospective families on the tours speak highly of our great school. We will be hosting our Open Night on Tuesday 25 March. 

Our Newsletter & Socials

For our new families, our newsletter is published once a month and highlights the many great things that are happening at Lilydale Heights College. Families can also follow us on our Facebook and Instagram accounts for regular highlights from the College. Compass is our main source of official communication and we encourage families to check Compass on a regular basis to stay up to date with what is happening at LHC.

Student Free Days 2025

The Department of Education provide schools with four Student Free Days per year for Professional Learning, Planning & Assessment and one Student Free Day as a Professional Practice Day. This is a total of five Student Free Days for the year. The first of these days was held on January 28. The remaining four Student Free Days are below. Students are not required to attend school on these days. We encourage students and families to put these dates in their calendars.

We will send out reminders of our Student Free Days closer to each date.

Term 2

May 29 (Thursday) – Professional Learning

June 20 (Friday) - Assessment & Reporting

Term 3

August 27 (Wednesday) – Professional Learning

Term 4

November 21 (Friday) – Professional Practice Day

I wish our entire College community an exciting, engaging and fulfilling year and I look forward to seeing us all work together to achieve our vision of maximising learning growth to ensure all students can thrive.

Shane Kruger

Principal