College Principal Message 

PRINCIPAL’S REPORT JUNE 2020

Well we have come full circle since our last meeting.  The decision to return to school was made without any pre warning so it required a very quick set of responses from the principal team.  I am pleased to notice that we had already anticipated most of the strategies suggested to us in DET communiques when they arrived.

We maintained communication with families and students every step of the way and ended up with a very comprehensive and easily digested set of strategies in terms of how we are working to keep everyone safe, which was further broken down into what parents can do and what students can do.

We naturally involved the OHS committee in executing the plans and provided staff with a cleaning kit to take to classes to add to the cleaning that is done by our extra cleaners and provide some reassurance.

With the arrival of the junior year levels on June 9, we added some expectations around arrival and dismissal times to stagger the timing without disrupting the timetable unduly and designated notional areas of the yard to year levels. 

The students are very happy to be back and teachers are also happy to have them back.  The return was somewhat marred by the news from Keilor Downs which created some understandable concern from parents whose children attended a VET class there. 

Our attendance rates during remote learning were almost as high as during face to face teaching which is an absolute credit to everyone at the college.  The teachers of course, for embracing Webex as the main means of keeping contact with students and adapting their teaching very quickly, but also everyone behind the scenes, like Julie and her team organising access to devices and the Aides figuring out how best to support their charges etc.

It was a wonderful team effort and I am incredibly proud of how everyone worked together for the common purpose of keeping our kids engaged and plugged into their education. Anecdotally some classes have actually performed better during remote learning than they were doing in Term 1.

To acknowledge the hard work and pressure teachers have been working under we took some time a couple of weeks ago to provide a wellbeing afternoon tea and encouraged them to have open, small group discussions reflecting on their reaction to the whole Corona crisis.  We provided the stimulus from a wellbeing webinar which provided a model of how people react to sudden and significant change. 

This was followed by a session to capture some details about how their teaching changed, what new things they learned and how they learned them, with a view to consciously selecting and deselecting things to continue into the future.  We have also engaged the student leaders to follow up with students.

I am incredibly proud of how we responded and how well we kept our students engaged.

We have 8 teaching staff who did not return to campus this term and 6 ES staff.  We are expecting further guidance about the long term plan for staff with compromising health conditions. 

A previous Campus Principal at Sydenham, Phil Coloca who has been working as a Student Achievement Manager in the regional office has just been appointed as the Foundation Principal at a new primary school being built near Melton.  We congratulate him, and as a consequence we have gone through the application process and appointed Lance Petherick to this position.  Congratulations.  Lance is currently Campus Principal at Kings Park.

One of our Leading Teachers has recently picked up a secondment in regional office so we have advertised an Acting Leading Teacher position with the tag of Student Achievement Leader.

At the moment we are considering an upgrade to the campus principal offices and administration area at Kings Park and will pursue the opportunity to apply for a grant under the building stimulus package.

The Doctors in Secondary Schools is continuing to run its consultations via Telehealth until at least Term 3. 

While we have been expending a great deal of energy moving to and from remote learning, the departmental expectations have not gone away.  We are currently undertaking our Midyear AIP reflection, which has been made slightly less onerous than usual.  And while our Pre Review Self Evaluation has been postponed until Term 4, we will be spending time in at least one of our council meetings next term to outline the strategies we are planning to use and also include you as one of our focus groups.  As part of the review process we may take an extra pupil free day in Term 3 seeing we missed our usual one in Term 2.

Ms Pip Griffiths

Acting College Principal