Principal's Report

Last week we received a couple of data sets that are considered pretty important in education circles – NAPLAN and the ‘Student Attitudes to School Survey’.  Regardless of what people think about the validity of national standardised testing, these results do give us an indication of how our school is travelling, whether our focus areas are bearing fruit for student wellbeing and learning and what we need to work on next.

NAPLAN testing was conducted back in May, for years 7 and 9 students.  All students should have received their individual results late last week – if you haven’t seen these results yet, please ask your child as they should have the A3 sheet in their bag (or in their locker at school).  Students and schools are measured on five areas of learning – Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation, Writing, Reading and Numeracy.  Whilst we are extremely proud of our year 7 results this year, we acknowledge that these fantastic achievements are largely due to the hard work that our Primary Schools put in place to support our students before they transition to secondary school.  What we are delighted with this year are significant improvements in our year 9 data, particularly in the growth students are exhibiting in spelling and writing between year 7 and year 9.  A lot of staff work very hard in our literacy and numeracy support teams to provide learning opportunities for students regardless of their current academic abilities.  I thank them all for their patience, skills, effort and enthusiasm to ensure that all students are challenged to be the best they can be.

The student attitudes to school survey was also conducted in May, for all students at our school.  This survey is mandated for all government schools in Victoria and provide students with the opportunity to reflect back to the school their experiences of teaching practice in the classroom, teacher-student relations, learning disposition, social engagement, school safety and bullying.  Invariably when a school focuses on one or two areas, these results improve and everyone crosses their fingers and hope that other areas don’t decrease.  At Warrnambool College this year we deliberately decided to focus on student voice and providing a consistently positive learning experience in the classroom.  We were hopeful that students would report positive shifts in our survey data in these areas, which they have.  What we didn’t necessarily expect was to positively impact all 19 areas that the survey measures!  In a couple of areas, namely junior school transition and ‘not experiencing bullying’, we have moved into the top quartile ranking for the state – a huge improvement on our data from 2017.  Much more work needs to be done as there are several areas where, in comparison to other secondary schools across the state, we are behind where we’d like to be.  But it is good to notice the improvements across the board and acknowledge that the initiatives we have in place are having a positive impact on students’ experience of learning at Warrnambool College.

With the coming of Spring and the promise of warmer weather, it’s a little easier to be optimistic about many things in life, data sets or otherwise.  I hope that you’re able to find glimpses of sunshine in the next fortnight and enjoy the benefits that this brings.

Kind Regards,

Dave Clift

Principal