Principal's Update

Is it hard to believe that we are already halfway through Term 4, our favourite time of the year, with many events, opportunities for learning and celebrations of our wonderful students. We look forward to sharing their learning and showcasing some of their work throughout the term.

I wanted to thank the amazing Mrs Zalaf for stepping into the principal role during my leave and for doing such a terrific job! I am extremely grateful that Dundas PS has the outstanding depth in our school leaders. I am blessed to have such a talented, cohesive leadership, admin and teaching team!

School Infrastructure Project Update

Last week, a progress update from School Infrastructure was shared with the school community. In summary: 

• The upgrade to Dundas Public School will include 6 classrooms, 2 multipurpose spaces, 2 learning commons, amenities and a covered walkway connecting the new building to the existing school.
• School Infrastructure looks forward to sharing this at an information session on Wednesday 4 December 2024, 3 pm to 6:30 pm in the school library.
• School Infrastructure will continue to develop the design for the new building, once finalised we will release the construction tender to appoint a builder.
• School Infrastructure anticipate releasing the tender early 2025, construction on the new building is likely to start in mid-late 2025.

More information

You can find more information about the project at edu.nsw.link/DundasPS or by scanning the QR code.

Wellbeing Week

This year, week 5 of each term has been a week where we stop the fast pace of busy teaching and learning programs and spend some time focused on the wellbeing of our students. For most classes on Wellbeing Wednesday, wellbeing activities will take place after lunch. Activities planned for Wellbeing Wednesday do not include devices, reducing screen time for our students.

I thank Ms Edwards for putting together the Wellbeing Wednesday activities that classes will be participating in this week. Students are welcome to come dressed in their favourite colours. For student sun protection and safety, clothing where shoulders are covered must be worn and closed-in shoes.  

Planning for 2025

The school leadership team has commenced planning for 2025. Currently, we are planning for less enrolments for 2025, with 41 kindergarten enrolments starting but we are losing 57 Year 6 students as they transition to high school. 

At this point in time, we are planning to have 12 classes for 2025. The number of classes is dictated by the staffing formula of the NSW Department of Education. Our current 2025 enrolment numbers equal forming 12 classes. 

We are extremely fortunate at DPS to have highly skilled, professional and passionate teachers. Creating classes is an extremely rigorous process that teachers take very seriously. Our aim is to provide equity for all students based on their academic, social and emotional needs. 

Shortly, students will be completing their friendship sociograms where they are asked to identify 5 students, they are friends with. A reminder of the DPS Class Formation & Teacher Allocation Policy document shared with our community at the beginning of 2024. Below is a link to the policy document on our school website.

Class_formation_and_teacher_allocation_policy_February_2024.pdf

If your child has any social, academic or emotional needs that we are unaware of which may have an impact on their class placement for 2025, please email the school - attention Lee Shipley. This information must be submitted by Friday, 29th November. 

Requests for specific teachers will not be taken into consideration.

School Development Days for 2025

The NSW Department of Education has mandated a change in the number of Staff Development Days (pupil free days) there is starting in 2025. Starting next year, there will be a total of 8 Staff Development Days that will be the same dates for both NSW public primary and secondary schools. 

Changes to School Development Days for 2025 Term One:

• Teachers commence Friday the 31st of January with 4 School Development Days.
• First day for students will be Thursday 6th February 2025
• Kindergarten students will commence on Thursday 6th of February 2025

2025_Calendar_Eastern_division_schools.pdf

School development days are used by schools to build on the knowledge and skills of our teachers, school leaders and school administrative support staff through a targeted professional learning program.

Professional learning is important in building the capabilities of all staff to ensure a highly skilled and professional workforce that can support the department’s vision for NSW public education to be Australia’s best education system and one of the finest in the world. School development days improve the learning outcomes of students by:

• providing targeted professional learning activities aligned to school strategic directions and Department of Education priorities
• enabling whole school planning and enhancing teacher quality, school leadership and management practices
• implementing legislative and policy requirements

Semester 2 student reports

A friendly reminder that the school will not be using the Audiri app next year, and as a result, we are asking all parents and caregivers to download the free Sentral for Parents App that is being used as an improved replacement. 

This change will improve our communication with our school community. The introduction of the Sentral for Parents App offers the introduction of online student reports as well as attendance and messaging platforms. 

This term, ALL student reports will be online which is a very exciting initiative. NO student reports will be printed and sent home. Having student reports available online means that they can be accessed at home whenever it is convenient. 

Student wellbeing

Staff at Dundas Public School address issues between students as soon as they are aware of them. If parents and carers have any concerns that their child may be experiencing issues with other students, please share those concerns as soon as possible with the child’s classroom teacher. 

The DPS school website outlines a helpful overview to assist parents and carers address their concerns to the right staff member. A link to the website page is below.

Link to DPS website page

Occasionally, staff manage a reported bullying issue between students, then discover that the issue between students was not bullying. Below is information from the NSW Department of Education website, which explains bullying in more detail.

What is Bullying?

Bullying can happen at school, at home or online. It is never okay and it is not a normal part of growing up.

There is a nationally agreed definition of bullying which all Australian schools now use:

Bullying is an ongoing and deliberate misuse of power in relationships through repeated verbal, physical and/or social behaviour that intends to cause physical, social and/or psychological harm. It can involve an individual or a group misusing their power, or perceived power, over one or more persons who feel unable to stop it from happening.

Bullying can happen in person or online, via various digital platforms and devices and it can be obvious (overt) or hidden (covert). Bullying behaviour is repeated, or has the potential to be repeated, over time (for example, through sharing of digital records).

Bullying of any form or for any reason can have immediate, medium and long-term effects on those involved, including bystanders. Single incidents and conflict or fights between equals, whether in person or online, are not defined as bullying.

Bullying has three key features. It:

1.         involves a misuse of power in a relationship

2.         is intentional, ongoing and repeated

3.         involves behaviours that can cause harm.

Bullying can be physical, verbal, or social. Bullying can be easy to see (overt), or hidden (covert), such as spreading rumours about another person or excluding them.

Bullying can also happen online using technology such as the internet or mobile devices. This is known as online bullying or cyberbullying.

A person can be bullied about many different things such as how they look, sound or speak; their background, religion, race or culture including Aboriginality; having a disability; their gender; their size or body shape or any other ways they may be different.

Some students are bullied about their academic or sporting achievements or hobbies.

Types of bullying behaviour

There are four main types of bullying behaviour:

• physical – examples include hitting, pushing, shoving or intimidating or otherwise physically hurting another person, damaging or stealing their belongings. It includes threats of violence
   
• verbal/written – examples include name-calling or insulting someone about an attribute, quality or personal characteristic 
   
• social (sometimes called relational or emotional bullying) – examples include deliberately excluding someone, spreading rumours, and sharing information that will have a harmful effect on the other person and/or damaging a person’s social reputation or social acceptance
   
• cyberbullying – any form of bullying behaviour that occurs online or via a mobile device. It can be verbal or written, and can include threats of violence as well as images, videos and/or audio.

Overt or covert bullying

Bullying can be easy to see and detect (overt) or hidden, subtle and hard to detect (covert). This means that schools need to be alert to possible subtle signs of bullying and check in regularly with students.

• Overt bullying involves physical actions such as punching or kicking or observable verbal actions such as name-calling and insulting.
• Covert bullying can be very difficult for someone outside of the interaction to identify. It can include hand gestures and threatening looks, whispering, excluding or turning your back on a person, and restricting where a person can sit and who they can talk with. 

Social bullying (spreading rumours, manipulation of relationships, excluding, isolating) is often covert bullying.

Some behaviours can appear to be bullying but are harassment. Harassment is language or actions that are demeaning, offensive or intimidating to a person. It can take many forms, including sexual harassment, disability harassment or racial discrimination. For instance, sexual harassment is unwelcome or unreciprocated conduct of a sexual nature, which could reasonably be expected to cause offence, humiliation or intimidation.

What is not bullying?

There are also some behaviours, which, although they might be unpleasant or distressing, are not bullying :

• mutual conflict that involves a disagreement, but not an imbalance of power. Unresolved mutual conflict can develop into bullying if one of the parties targets the other repeatedly in retaliation
• single episode acts of nastiness or physical aggression, or aggression directed towards many different people, is not bullying
• social rejection or dislike is not bullying unless it involves deliberate and repeated attempts to cause distress, exclude or create dislike by others.

What is cyberbullying?

Cyberbullying is bullying behaviour using the internet or digital devices.

It might include:

• sending abusive texts and emails
• posting unkind messages or images
• imitating others online
• excluding others online
• tagging people in pictures against their wishes
• threatening to do something, such as send revealing images.

How is it different to other forms of bullying?

Cyberbullying is particularly hard for young people to cope with because:

• it's more likely to happen outside school
• harmful material can be shared quickly and long after the first incident
• it can happen any time, day or night
• it is more difficult for children to defend themselves or to get away.

What to do when a child reports cyberbullying?

If your child reports cyberbullying:

• listen to them carefully
• discuss a plan of action
• involve relevant school personnel
• plan and follow up
• parents can download the department's fact sheets on anti-bullying and if your child is being bullied.

What children and young people need to know:

• Don’t reply or respond – bullies thrive on the reactions they get from their victims.
• Save the evidence – take screenshots of cyberbullying posts so you can use them as evidence later.
• Tell a trusted adult – children don't need to deal with bullies by themselves, teachers and parents will help.
• Report cyberbullying – this could be to your school or in more serious cases to the police and the Office of the eSafety Commissioner.

Kindergarten Orientation

Our new students had a wonderful time at their first orientation session last week. We look forward to welcoming them back next week! Thank you to Ms Edwards, Mrs Haddock and our office administration team for the thorough planning and preparation.

P&C AGM meeting 

Please join us tomorrow evening for our 2024 P&C AGM meeting. It will be held in the staffroom starting at 6pm and also via Teams for those that cannot attend the meeting in person. All P&C executive positions will be open to be filled at the AGM. 

Join the meeting now

Meeting ID: 488 389 555 761

Passcode: 8RZcKF

New School Improvement Plan in 2025

Next year we will be starting a new School Improvement Plan (SIP). We will have 2 identified Strategic Direction areas which will be:

• Student Growth & Attainment and 
• Continuous Improvement. 

We have identified that Numeracy as an area of focus for our school where we would like to improve. Even though overall, we were very happy with this year’s NAPLAN data, we were disappointed with the lack of uplift from 2023 in numeracy. 

Year 3 numeracy data of students in Strong and Exceeding proficiency levels dropped by 0.5% from 2023 and Year 5 data of 77% had a small uplift of 3.4%, but it was the only NAPLAN test where we were not over 80% in the Strong and Exceeding proficiency levels. We believe we can improve those results over the next 3 years. 

School Dismissal at 3pm & students playing on school grounds after school

This is a friendly reminder that school dismissal is at 3pm. Students not attending Camp Australia should be picked up at 3pm. 

Students should not be on the school grounds unsupervised after 3pm. If parents are running late and cannot pick up their children at 3pm dismissal, the students will be taken to the school office until parents can be contacted to arrange their pick-up. 

Students should not be playing on school equipment after school. The play equipment is clearly signed, and we expect that parents and carers, follow the expectations to ensure students are safe. 

If parents are not able to pick up their children on a regular basis, then the children should be registered to attend Camp Australia on those days. 

Students should not be left alone in a school park waiting to be picked up by their parents. These students are often without adult supervision which is unsafe. 

Enrol now for Kindergarten 2025

We are still accepting online enrolments for Kindergarten 2025. Your child can start Kindergarten at the beginning of the school year if they turn five on or before 31 July in that year. By law, all children must be enrolled in school by their sixth birthday.

How to Enrol

If you are an Australian or New Zealand citizen or permanent resident and live within our designated intake area, you are eligible to complete the online enrolment application. You will then need to finalise the application at the school.

Click here to access School Finder and check that your address is in our catchment.

Parents will be asked to complete the 100-point residential address check to confirm they live within the school’s designated intake area.

Click here to read about the 100-point residential address check.

Click here to enrol online.

We look forward to meeting you and your child very soon!