Principal's Report

Leadership

Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other (John F Kennedy)

With our school leadership team, business manager and student leaders attending leadership professional development and leadership forums last week and this week, I have spent considerable time reflecting on the importance of developing leadership at all levels of the school and the important role it plays in student learning.

Leadership is all about empowerment. We build this empowerment by giving others the opportunity to lead and great leadership itself builds the empowerment of those we are leading. As teachers we are constantly looking to empower our students to take ownership of their learning journey, set goals, challenge themselves and be reflective learners. As Principal, I am also trying to empower the teachers, aides and office staff. With a sense of collective efficacy (a feeling that by working together we can achieve our goals) the school is able to constantly improve and provide better outcomes for all the students here.

Providing leadership opportunities for students at Marlborough happens both formally and informally. Leading group-work in class, demonstrating leadership in sports, being a leader in the school-yard and having official leadership roles are all ways that students have the opportunity to lead. As a school we must not only provide these opportunities to lead, we need to also explicitly teach the skills connected to leadership. We need to teach our students that great leaders need to be great listeners, reflective, trustworthy, flexible, visionary and great communicators.

As a primary school we are not just preparing our students for secondary school, we are aiming to support our students' first educators (their parents and carers) to help them to become active, confident and caring citizens. We are all called upon to be leaders at certain times, and preparing our students for this is something we are passionate about.

Good luck to our student leaders at the leadership forum this week and leadership conference next week. We are sure that you will represent Marlborough fantastically well and we hope you learn a lot from these experiences.

Working Bee

A huge thank you to everyone who attended the working bee on Friday afternoon and worked so hard to improve our school environment. The school is looking great thanks to your efforts and I am sure all of the students are appreciative of the changes we have made to the school environment.

At the working bee, the following things were achived:

Re-design of the area outside the staff room (fence removed, surface re-laid, garden tidied up). This area will become an outdoor chess area using the existing 5 tables.
Installation of another garden bed near the 3/4 unit.
General tidying and blowing of paths around the school.
Cleaning of drains.

Health and Well-being Survey

We have a working party of our School Council that is working on the 'Achievement Program'. The Achievement Program is a Victorian Government evidence-based framework to support the health and wellbeing of everyone in our school. Students, staff, parents and carers all perform better when we are healthy.

In order to focus this work on the areas of greatest need we are asking that you complete a school Health and Well-being survey. It will only take a few minutes to complete and will gave us great data to ensure that we can work on areas that the school community sees as the most important.

You can access the survey from this link: Health and Well-being Survey

2018 Enrolments

If you have a younger child that you are planning on enroling at Marlborough in 2018 please download an enrolment form from here or collect one from the office. The sooner that we receive enrolments, the easier it is to begin planning for next year.

If you have any friends or family members in the area with children beginning school next year, please let them know that we have tours available at these times:

Tuesday 21st March 10:00am

Saturday 25th March 11:00am

Thursday 30th March 10:00am

Tuesday 18th April 10:00am

Saturday 22nd April 11:00am

Thursday 27th April 10:00am

Tuesday 2nd May 10:00am

Wednesday 10th May 6:30pm

To book in for one of these tours please contact the school on 9870 3468 or at marlborough.ps@edumail.vic.gov.au

If you are unable to make it to one of these times, please contact the school and we can make an alternative booking.