Principal's Message

Dear Parents/Carers

Curriculum Day – Monday 10th of July 

Students first day for Term 3 will be Tuesday, 11th July. This is our last curriculum day for the year. This does not include Professional Practice Days. Each teacher at EPS will have a (1) PP Day in semester two on a day of their choosing. This will be communicated to you in advance.

Online safety 

We continue to focus on educating students to make responsible and informed decisions through our curriculum and thank you for your support in having conversations around appropriate online behaviour with your child at home. We were recently informed by a parent of the school of some great advice for students with personal iPads/apple or smart watches. If they receive a message from anyone they don’t know, do not respond and show a trusted adult straight away.

Please see the E-Safety website for further resources for kids and  resources for parents/carers. Another resource is the Beacon App, which is a cyber safety educational app designed to keep parents and carers up-to-date with trusted, tailored information, to help keep their kids safe online.

We look forward to providing you with further details next term for our onsite parent/carer workshop on online safety with the Alannah and Madeline Foundation. Please pencil in Wednesday 16th of August in your diaries.

Before and After School

Members of the leadership team, including myself, are on yard duty every morning from 8:45am and every afternoon from 3:30pm. We welcome students to school and are so impressed by the excellent social skills that students demonstrate when they engage in a conversation or simply say hello or goodbye. School starts at 9:00am. It is fantastic to see so many of our students arriving between 8:45am and 9:00am ready for learning. If you need to drop your child off earlier, it is important that you utilise Team Kids for before and after school care. We know that getting to work in the mornings and dropping your children off can be tricky which is why we offer before and after school care as a service to our community.

Staffing Update

Diana Telford has been appointed to the Library Technician role at our school. She has been working the past few months in a casual vacancy but was successfully appointed to a permanent position at our school last week. Diana has been the driving force behind the Premiers Reading Challenge where thousands of books have been read and registered and has opened the library to reading enthusiasts during the recess and lunch breaks. Welcome (officially) Diana. 

How do we assess students at EPS?

Assessment of students at EPS is an ongoing process and takes a number of forms.

We believe that any account of a student’s learning and development needs to be rich, robust and comprehensive. Our quality assessment design ensures that multiple sources of data and evidence are collected which includes data triangulation - that is, using at least three sources of assessment data – to capitalise on strengths and reduce weaknesses that can stem from using a single source. Some sources of assessment data and evidence we use include:

• Standardised assessments from government authorities and specialist providers
• Locally generated assessments mapped to the Victorian Curriculum, including rich and open ended tasks
• Teacher judgements against curriculum standards

We recognise that any one method will have its strengths and limitations. By adopting this triangulation approach in our assessment of student learning we are able to draw from multiple data sources and assessment methods to look for patterns in what data is telling us about student learning. This enables us to create richer narratives and draw more confident conclusions about the state of student learning within our school.

I would like to thank our staff for their support of our students and their learning, it has been a successful first semester with so much achieved. I am very much looking forward to Term 3 but not before I take some leave over the first few weeks to visit Europe and celebrate my brother’s wedding in Tuscany. Nicola Smith will be the acting Principal throughout my absence.

Thank you all for your ongoing engagement and support with your child's learning. I wish you all a well-deserved break.

Thank you,

Michael