Leadership Report 

Adventures in our new playground space.

2021 Grade Structure

Foundation/Year 1: Will consist of eight mixed grades of Foundation and Year 1 students with a limit of 21 students per teacher with a total of up to 168 students in the F/1 area. They will occupy the current F/1 spaces and the new portable classrooms.

Years 2/3: Will occupy the current area, but will be spread across the four classrooms with four teachers in the area. We expect the student to teacher ratio to be around 21 - 23 for each of the four teachers. This will mean there will be two English teachers teaching in a team of two with a Spanish teacher.

Years 4-6: Will occupy the current area, but will be spread across the four classrooms with four teachers in the area. We expect the student to teacher ratio to be around 21 - 23. This will mean there will be two teams consisting an English teacher teaching alongside a Spanish teacher.

Specialists Programs: Will consist of Visual Arts teacher, Performing Arts teacher, Music teacher & P.E. teacher. The difference for 2021 will be our Specialist teachers except our P.E teacher will be delivering the programme in Spanish.

Assigning teachers to Grades

We are currently completing this process and expect to publish in next week's newsletter the full list of teachers who have been assigned to which grade.

Parent Requests

Our policy as mentioned earlier in a previous newsletter this term parents may have input in writing to me the principal. Your request will inform our process but will not decide the outcome as to who will be your child's teacher in 2021.

Exciting time for Newlands - 2021

This is a really very exciting time in the ongoing growth of Newlands PS in 2021. With an expected enrollment above 300 students having their learning being inclusive of and delivered in a Spanish bilingual environment. 

We will have 12 Spanish teachers delivering the Victorian Curriculum alongside 12 English teachers. This cannot be underestimated in what it means for learning languages in the State of Victoria. 

We are also extremely fortunate that three of our Specialist teachers have the skill and capacity to support the Spanish language learning outside of the classroom. 

Our school and community should celebrate this achievement, because it is extremely rare for one school to have so many teachers teaching another language in one GOVERNMENT school and self funding the programme.