Principal's Report
Strategic Directions
All schools in Victoria participate in a school review every four years. This process started at Brentwood in Term 4 last year and involved all key stakeholders; staff, students, parents, representatives from the Department of Education and Principals from other schools. It was a great opportunity to celebrate our school’s achievements over the past four years and identify our key areas to focus on for the next four. This process formally concluded this term with our School Council officially endorsing our new strategic plan last week. Here is a brief overview of our strategic directions for the next four years.
We have three broad goals that will focus our work in continually improving student learning outcomes at Brentwood.
- Maximise the Learning Growth of Every Student
- Maximise Student Agency of Every Student
- Optimise Student Wellbeing
Maximise the Learning Growth of Every Student:
Improving learning growth of students at Brentwood continues to be a focus for our community. This is important to help our students become the best learner and person they can be. For many Brentwood students we know that they are very capable academically and often perform above state or national benchmarks in many areas, but particularly literacy and numeracy. A focus on learning growth will enable all students to focus more on their improvement and growth rather than their performance against expected outcomes for age. If we simply focused only on performance we would be limiting our students’ learning by putting a ceiling on their improvement. Our goal also recognises that learning growth is for EVERY student, no matter where they begin in their learning journey. All students are at different stages in their learning in each of their subjects; some start below where we would expect and some start above. This goal reminds us that ALL students should demonstrate growth no matter their starting point.
Over the coming years we expect to see our students engaging more in developmental rubrics (a continuum that states what students can do or know in their subjects). This will help them identify where they are at in their learning and allow them to set goals for the next steps. Our teachers will continue to work in Professional Learning Communities focused on tracking student growth. This is a practice that has been in place for many years, however, has become a bigger focus for us since 2020. We are now a lead school in the area and supporting neighbouring schools with this student-centred approach to professional learning for staff.
Maximise Student Agency of Every Student:
Student Agency can be defined as “the level of autonomy and power that a student experiences in the learning environment…… Agency gives students the power to direct and take responsibility for their learning, creating independent and self-regulating learners” (DET, 2019).
At Brentwood we expect all students to be the best learner and person they can now and in the future. To achieve this and to ensure our students achieve our vision of them being ‘future ready’ they will need to be able to take responsibility, not just for their learning but their wellbeing too.
This is big goal for our school and one that we will be first exploring with staff, students, and parents before developing further strategies to continually build the level of agency for our students It will require a strong framework and shared understanding of what agency is and isn’t at Brentwood. Over the coming years we will begin seeing students more supported by their ASPIRE and classroom teachers in enhancing their understanding of their learning and wellbeing growth and making informed decisions, within a structured framework. We will also see students setting more individual learning goals in their classes based on their own learning progress.
Optimise Student Wellbeing:
Our students’ wellbeing is critically important to their success at school, but more importantly for them to becoming the best person they can be. We are very fortunate to have an outstanding Wellbeing Team at Brentwood, however this goal recognises that supporting our students’ wellbeing is a collective effort of our whole school community.
Over the next four years we will be developing a more structured whole school wellbeing framework so that staff and students are able to see their role in improving the wellbeing of themselves and those around them. As part of the curriculum teachers will begin to embed wellbeing capabilities into the students’ learning tasks so they can see the link between learning and wellbeing. This will enable students to develop a deeper understanding of wellbeing and themselves as person and learner which in turn will support them in employing strategies that better manage their wellbeing. Ultimately this will help empower our students so that they are more able to focus on their learning in class, but more importantly develop the necessary life skills to successfully navigate the ever-changing world we live in.
Further Information:
Our Strategic Plan can be found on our website here.
Our Annual Implementation Plan breaks down our four focus into yearly goals and actions. It can be found here.
We look forward sharing our improvement journey over the next for years.
NAPLAN
This week, our Year 7 and 9 students completed their NAPLAN testing. This was the first experience for these students (and staff) completing NAPLAN on the new online portal and all should be congratulated on the smooth roll out of the online testing. We would also like to acknowledge the work of Simon Giang and the school IT department for their support in getting our systems and the students’ devices ready to go. The shift to completing NAPLAN online has a number of benefits for students, parents and schools. One of the biggest benefits is the adaptive nature of the tests, where a student’s test will adapt to provide students with questions to either extend students in their thinking with more challenging questions, or provide students with greater scaffolding with some simpler questions. This means that the tests will provide students, parents, teachers and schools with a more detailed and accurate understanding of what students can do in each of the areas tested (Reading, Writing, Conventions of Language and Numeracy).
Whilst individualised results to students and parents won’t be released until August, some initial whole school data will be provided for teachers in the coming months so they can individualise and target the needs to individuals and small groups of students in their classes.
Students who were absent for the testing this week should keen and eye on Teams and Compass for details of when they will be scheduled to complete a ‘catch-up’ NAPLAN session.
SLC Opening
On Friday May 6, our local member Matt Fregon officially opened our brand new $4.6 million Senior Learning Centre. He was joined by the Principal Team, School Councillors, Tectura Architects, Newpol Constructions and most importantly our students.
The SLC has been a welcomed addition to the learning spaces at Brentwood by providing two new modern classrooms and large, open and comfortable independent study space for Year 12 students. During the opening our Year 12 captains remarked how grateful they are for having such a wonderful learning space and how the students have been taking advantage of it.
We would like to thank Matt Fregon for his participation in the opening, but more importantly for his ongoing support of Brentwood Secondary College. This building marks the completion of stage 1 of a whole school masterplan to upgrade Brentwood Secondary College and we hope to see more funding in the future to fund further stages.
John Ballagh, Principal