Head of Primary Years' Report

Dear Parents, Carers and Friends of Hazel Glen College,

Term 1 has been a wonderful start to the year. There has been a buzz in our classrooms with students meeting new friends, developing their routines and making connections with their teachers with their class and across cohorts. Learning progress is now communicated via the online platform of SeeSaw where you can view a snapshot of student learning across the term. This feedback replaces the previous Term 1 interim reports. Thank you to the families who also booked in for parent teacher conferences this term. These times are valuable for building the partnership between home and school to work collaboratively with the College to improve outcomes for your child/ren. If you have not yet had a conversation with your child's teacher this term, I encourage you to do so. This can be arranged either via a meeting or phone call. Thank you to the families who supported our Easter Bonnet Parade this morning. This is always a fun way to end the Term and we enjoy seeing the creations made by the children.

Last week, our Student Leadership Academy promoted the initiative of Ride to School Day. The students tallied results, created posters and welcomed our large numbers who rode or walked to school on the day. 

At our first School Council meeting this term, the AGM was held. At this meeting, the 2024 Annual Report was presented and endorsed by School Council. We thank Greg Davis as our outgoing School Council President for his contributions to the College and welcome Bek Lilley to the role as our 2025 School Council President. We look forward to the work of School Council this year. An effective school council strengthens community confidence in the school and helps to build and secure the school’s reputation.

Next term, our teachers will implement Professional Learning Communities (PLC) where they collaborate as teams to address specific improvement priorities in the areas of learning and wellbeing. This is aligned to our Annual Improvement Plan goal to consistently implement data-driven, high quality pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning. Through PLCs, our year level teachers will deep dive into Victoria's reading position, which includes systematic synthetic phonics in Prep to Year 2 and explicit teaching of the 'Big 6' through a structured literacy approach focusing on student reading needs across Years 3 to 6. From 2025, all Victorian government students from Prep to Year 2 are being taught using a systematic synthetic phonics approach as part of their reading programs, with a minimum of 25 minutes daily explicit teaching of phonics and phonemic awareness. Systematic synthetic phonics is a structured approach that explicitly teaches the relationship between sounds and letters to read words. We have implemented the evidence based program Little Learners Love Literacy to support the reading position and continue to review and explore evidence based approaches across the Primary Years.

Our Student Leadership Academy hosted MP Rob Mitchell the Member for McEwan who shared stories about his career and answered questions from the students. The students were especially interested in hearing about Rob attending a lunch with the late Queen. Rob gifted a new set of flags for the Primary Years that we will be able to use for our assemblies and for our outside flag poles. We are thankful for his visit this week and for providing flags to the school.

To end the term we held our annual Easter Bonnet Parade.  It was amazing to see how creative our families and students were in making their hats for the parade.  A special thank you to Ms Frangos who organised an Easter Raffle for all the students in the Primary Years.  We appreciate the support from Laurimar Bakers Delight, Woolies Mernda Town Centre, Kmart Plenty Valley, Morrison Kleeman and Laurimar Woolies in supplying goods for our raffle.

This week, we farewell a member of our Education Support Team, Danielle Smith. Dani has been part of the Hazel Glen College community for 8 years and she will be missed dearly by the students, staff and families that she has worked alongside. We thank Dani for her contributions to the College and wish Dani well at her new school.

Andrea Lynch

Head of Primary Years

Hazel Glen College