Principal's News

We are now in the sixth week of home learning for this term. By the end of term 3, we will have had nearly half a year of schooling that has been different from what we are all used to. 

Our parents, children and school staff have responded very well to the COVID-19 home learning situation. As I have said before, I see this as crisis learning more than home learning, which we are continually mindful of as we plan learning activities for your children. We need to plan and deliver instructional experiences that move children forward academically but also take into account that we are all currently living through uncertain times.

When you have very little time to respond to new directives, you don't have the opportunity to investigate or take a measured approach.  However, the changes to how we have delivered learning to the children this term and how we are interacting with parents will lead to positive changes in general for the school and community moving forward. 

At school, we are viewing the educational changes imposed on us by the Covid-19 response  as an opportunity to look for new ideas and ways of doing things at school that will benefit the children. We want our Covid experience to have a positive impact on the education of the children at Holy Family.  There have been changes in how teachers deliver the curriculum to the children.  We are looking very closely at these changes and how we can incorporate parts of into classroom practice when we are all back at school.

Teachers are frequently meeting with parents through Google Meets to communicate, inform and connect. We have also hosted parent-teacher meetings online. Previously we thought the only way to have these meetings was at school; now we can see that for some parents this could be the preferred option and we will consider this in future school planning. We have also had online Program Support Group meetings to discuss and plan adjustments for some of our students. It is incredible to think that three or four people can be at a meeting, all in different locations. The minutes of these meetings are signed by everyone that attends and finding easy digital ways of signing them will be beneficial in the future for parents who participate in the meeting online and cannot get to school to sign documentation. 

At the moment, while we are all in lock-down and restricted to where we can go and what we can do, it is hard to see any positives in the COVID experience. We can only hope that the people who are making the decisions know what they are doing.  

Finally, Prep enrolments for 2021 are open! If you have a child or know of someone with a school-aged child who would like to attend our school, please email me at principal@hfdoveton.catholic.edu.au

Everyone stay safe and support each other and hopefully in a few weeks we can start heading towards a freeing up of the current restrictions.

Steve Twomey

Principal