From the Principals' Desk
Tracey Mackin - Acting Principal
Welcome back!
It has been a pleasure to return to Nossal and the re-engage with students, staff and families in the last two weeks. Our new Year 9 students have been enthusiastically embracing the opportunities available to them as they transition into our community, and our existing students have once more filled the building with laughter and enthusiasm. Our PFA have held their first meeting for the year, and our sporting teams (as you will see later in the Sporting News section!) have experienced their first successes of the year. Surrounded by this activity, I find myself looking forward to the work we will do together in 2023.
More than the mere pleasure of collaborating with engaged and enthusiastic individuals, however, I am this year looking forward to rediscovering an emotion that drew me to education in the first place - the joy of learning. There is nothing quite like the combined sense of achievement, excitement and optimism which comes from learning something - and especially from noticing that you've learned it! Sometimes that learning happens in a moment - you can almost feel your mind re-organising itself as a new piece of knowledge allows a collection of ideas that you haven't really unterstood before to fall into place. During these "Eureka!" experiences, the joy of learning brings with it a special sort of exhilaration.
Much more commonly, though, we learn things slowly and over a long time period. This is why reflection is so important - it allows us to take a broad look at where we are and compare it to where we started. This is especially true in subjects like English. I encourage all of our students to find and read a piece they wrote 2 or 3 years ago, and take a moment to be proud of how far they've developed since then as readers and as writers. This is a quieter joy, which brings with it something less like exhilaration and more like satisfaction, but it can still be a surprise to realise how much more you've managed to fit into your brain in the interim.
Right now, we are at the start of the 2023 learning journey. I'm confident that when our students - and our staff - reflect at the start of 2024, they will be able to celebrate many joyful learning experiences. As much as I look forward to working with them, I look forward to celebrating with them.
Start of Year Ceremonials
We were honoured and grateful this year to be joined by both our namesake, Sir Gustav Nossal, and our foundation principal, Mr Roger Page, to our annual Foundation Assembly. You will see a reflection on the Assembly by two of our students in the General News section later in this newsletter, so I won't spend long on the event here. I will just take a moment to thank Gus and Roger, as well as Mrs Margaret Page and Mr Keith Butler, for joining us on the day. It was a pleasure to have them there, and a pleasure also to once more be able to welcome some of our parents into the audience. I was proud of our students - both the Class of 2023, and the incoming Class of 2026 - for their respectful conduct throughout the event, and I hope that our new students felt well and truly welcomed into our community by the end of the day.
In addition to our new students, the Foundation Assembly was an opportunity to welcome our new staff to the school. Able as they are, I have no doubt that they felt a similar level of trepidation to our incoming students as they came forward to receive their Nossal badge from Sir Gus. They were introduced to you in a newsletter late last year, but it's a pleasure to have them finally join us on campus.
School Review
Last year our strategic plan came to an end, and during Term 1 the school will be under review. A school review is an opportunity to reflect on our current practice and to consider how it may be improved, as well as to set some targets for our future work. On Monday 20 March one of the steps of the review - the school's Fieldwork Day - will be held. Throughout this day, the review panel will consult with various focus groups including different groups of students, staff and parents. I will soon using Compass to call for expressions of interest from our current parents to be a part of one of these focus groups.
As usual, I look forward to hearing a diverse range of ideas from different members of our community, so that we can weave these ideas together to create the best environment possible for our students now and into the future.
School Council: Call for Nominations
In the General News section below you will find the nomination forms for parents who are interested in being a part of the Nossal HS School Council. The School Council plays a significant role in establishing and maintaining the broad direction of the school and, more particularly, in providing oversight of the school's finances and operations. It includes a cross-section of key stakeholders in our community and will this year be one of a number of groups to whom we will turn for advice and direction as we undertake our School Review.
This year there are four (4) places available for new parent representatives. Whether you are a new or an existing parent, I strongly encourage you to consider nominating yourself for one of these places. Nominations close at 4pm on Monay 20 February and will be followed by an election process.
Top Arts: Theatre Studies
Before we leave 2022 behind, I am proud to announce that not one but two of our senior Theatre Studies students have been selected to perform their monologues during this year's Top Arts performance series. Cecilia Liu and Lola Sargasso will be performing at the Malthouse Theatre on Thursday 16 March. We congratulate them on this impressive achievement.
Works@Nossal
Those of you who drive into the school may have noticed that our parking spaces and other road markings have been refreshed. It's a small but noticeable sign of the various works that were done on campus over the course of the holidays. In addition, the school's solar panels were replaced with an upgraded installation and a host of maintenance work (such as replacing some of our classroom desks) in the buildings and grounds.
In future months, Nossal will also be once again affected by the ongoing upgrades to Clyde Road. The project is in its early stages and more information will be forthcoming, but our drivers should be aware that the next set of works will focus on the entry to the Federation University site itself, and to the bridge over the freeway nearby. As usual, the Major Road Projects team are doing their best to ensure that our community is kept involved and has an opportunity to have a say in their project. In coming months, I will be distributing information about the proposed works and calling for input from those of us affected by the works.
Annual Privacy Reminder
Finally, amongst the various other official bits of information being conveyed to you at this time of year, I would like to remind you that our school collects, uses, discloses and stores student and parent personal information for standard school functions or where permitted by law, as stated in the Schools’ Privacy Policy.
Please take time to read our school’s collection notice, found on our website
For more information about privacy, refer to: Schools’ Privacy Policy — information for parents. This information is also available in ten community languages:
- Amharic
- Arabic
- Dari
- Gujarati
- Mandarin
- Somali
- Sudanese
- Turkish
- Urdu
- Vietnamese
You can also review the guidance we provide on how we work online and the approaches we take to ensure that our online environment is a safe and secure one by reading our Digital Learning Policy. Like all of our policies, our Digital Learning Policy sits within our Child Safety Policy and Structures, which are central to the work we do to keep our students safe. You can see all of our policies, including our Child Safety Policies, here:
A Joyful 2023
As we move out of "starting 2023" and into "learning during 2023" I want to return again to the notion of joy in learning. We are a school full of students and staff who are dedicated and passionate about their learning, and that means we take what we do seriously. I value that willingness to take learning seriously very much - amongst other things, it makes us a community that respects the rights of our peers to learn and grow. As we do that, though, I hope that we all remember to make a little space for counting up not just the extrinsic rewards of learning (like the marks), but also the moments when learning and joy are the same thing.
Tracey Mackin
Acting Principal