Dear Parents,

Welcome to the new school year! I’m feeling very excited for the year ahead.

The first two days of term, the staff came together to focus on the expectations for the year to ensure that all staff are on the same page moving forward. I’m pleased with our work completed last year around the teaching and learning that occurs at our school and the consistently that now exists across the school.

There is a great sense of calmness in the school this year which I believe is attributed to having straight classes across the school for the main curriculum areas as well as our work with the Positive Behaviour for Learning (PBL) framework. Our work with the PBL framework will continue this year.

Our focus this year will be around the following 5 goals which make up our Annual Action Plan:

To improve achievement in phonetic awareness and phonemes in particular in Yr Prep to Year 2.
To improve achievement in Mathematics in particular in Patterns and Algebra in Years 3-6.
To improve our student knowledge and understanding of Catholic Traditions and Teachings.
To increase community awareness and engagement.
To have a consistent understanding and language across the school when dealing with student behaviour.

In this newsletter, I will focus on goal 4 and our progress towards achieving this goal. Each newsletter I will focus on a different goal. This is great information and feedback to the community as we head into our next school review in 2027 which is conducted for all schools every four years.

Goal 4 of our Annual Action Plan is to increase community awareness and engagement. To support this I have released Miss Chelsea Perrin this year for one day a week to work on our social media presence. Miss Perrin holds a degree in Communications and has a passion for working in this space. Her work has started to have an impact with 10 school tours already conducted so far this year for enrolment for this and next year across different year levels. Currently we have enrolments up to and including 2031. As part of this goal, we have prepared flyers for our Playgroup (now Fridays) and for School Tours for distribution to maternal health centres, child care centres and kindergartens. If you have any personal connections with these providers please pick up some flyers from Reception.

In celebration of the beginning of our school year, the students and staff of the three schools in our Parish came together at The Basilica, Our Lady of Victories in Camberwell. Thank you to Father Ian Vergel for being our celebrant on the day.

Based on community feedback, we have moved to one platform in how we communicate. We spent last year exploring the best options. We have introduced the platform called SIMON with the parent portal referred to as PAM. We hope you find this efficient and effective.

Also, in light of the lack of parents accessing the newsletter we have tried to think of ways we can further engage more parents in their child’s learning. Therefore we have introduced the platform called Seesaw where students post individual pieces of their work each week. This hopes to be a more personalised approach rather than a generalised one presented in previous newsletters.

Moving forward our newsletters will include a Termly Newsletter from each Classroom Teacher including Specialists this will highlight an overview of what will be covered during the term. Also, on a fortnightly basis a Newsletter will be issued and will include a Principal’s segment around how we are progressing in terms of our annual goals as well as an update from our Specialist teachers.

I’m always open to your feedback, so please feel free to send me an email or have a chat in the playground.

Kind regards

Robyn

Our Lady of Good Counsel School, Deepdene

A leading faith community inspiring learners to shape tomorrow

Issue 6 copy · 16 Feb 2026

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