A message from the Principal

This week at SKiPPS we have enjoyed celebrating Harmony Week as a whole-school community. 

Mel goes into detail about these wonderful events, activities and learning later in the newsletter.

Harmony Week is about inclusiveness, respect and a sense of belonging for everyone.​ I feel that this event links so closely with our own school values and ethos.

As a school we are determined that everyone should feel safe and welcome at SKiPPS and this week has shown the amazing diversity of nationalities, languages and cultures that make up our school community and that we are so proud of. We want to make sure that nobody in our community experiences racism or any other behaviours that make them feel that this school is not the place for them.

This determination is reflected  in our school's 2024 Annual Implementation Plan (AIP) - the document that sets out our core priorities and actions for this year based on the long-term vision outlined in our School Strategic Plan.

In our plan, we have set ourselves an action that we will 'Create an inclusive school community that celebrates diversity'.

To achieve this, beyond the wonderful events of this week, we have also made a commitment in our AIP that this year we will 'Engage with the Centre for Multicultural Youth ‘Standing up to Racism’ resources to create an action plan and policy to support inclusion'.

You can expect to hear more later in the year about what this action and policy will look like and we invite any parents who might be keen to work with us in this area to contact me on neil.scott@education.vic.gov.au. 

Beyond this important work, our AIP is driven by two other core 'Key Improvement Strategies';

• Strengthen a whole-school approach to high-quality instructional practice in Writing
• Build teacher capability to identify and respond to student wellbeing needs.

During the year you will be able to read in the newsletter the various ways that we are working towards these and, indeed tomorrow's curriculum day will focus on the teaching of writing and you would have received communication recently about our use of Pivot as a tool to better understand and gather the views and attitudes of our students. 

We encourage all of our families to engage with our Annual Implementation Plan to better understand what, where and how we are trying to improve.

This plan is discussed each month at our Education and Policy sub-committee meetings and then also by our School Council (who are responsible for monitoring our AIP throughout the year). All of our parents and carers are welcome to attend these meetings.

Neil Scott

Principal