Warrandyte Primary School - Alert

Principal  Message

Hello to our families

 

We are approaching the final days of Term 2, which is always a busy term for schools. Next week you will be receiving your child/ren's school report via Compass. The teachers spend a great deal of time putting these reports together and your child's achievements and future learning goals are a true reflection of where your child is on the learning continuum and the future goals are taken directly from this and will be used by teachers next term to inform their planning and teaching. 

 

Each report has 'nutshell' statements which are written by your teacher, and this looks the same for all students as they are a summary of the topics and skills covered within that subject of the last semester. The student achievement dot points are differentiated for each student and indicate the skills your child has been able to demonstrate throughout Semester 1. These are taken from the Achievement Standards of the Victorian Curriculum. Similarly, the Future goals will indicate your child's next steps in learning for that subject. 

 

For our new families, we run Parent-Teacher conferences in Week 2-3 of Term 3. This allows you time over the holiday period to read through your child/ren's report and consider any questions you might have in relation your child's progress of needs.

You will soon be able to book these conferences through Compass and we offer face-to-face of online conferences.

 

 

Out of Hours School Care

We are still working hard behind the scenes in relation to the administrative work that needs to take place to transfer the OHSC service to the School Council from Our Patch.

We are finalising the recruitment for this service and believe we will be able to announce this early next week, all going to plan. 

 

The School Council have agreed to take on the Our of Hours Care program and this requires a lot of additional training and work for them and the school. However, it is our belief that an OHSC is a service that families rely on and therefore we will do all we can to support their needs. A subcommittee for OHSC will be formed within the School Council and myself and the Business Manager, Elisha McPhedran will be a part of this committee, reporting back to the School Council. 

 

We are working to have the program ready to run by the first week of Term 3 and will update over the holiday period if necessary. The School Council have agreed to the hours of operation in Term 3. We will run the After School Care program, Monday - Friday.  We will not be running a Before Care Program to begin with as we try to make the program financially viable. It is our intention to provide a Before School Program as soon as possible, providing we have the numbers for this. This year there have only been an average of 2 students using the Before School Care Program. Look out for a Compass message next week and throughout the holidays, confirming all our details.

 

 

School Review

We underwent our School Review last week and the outcomes were incredibly positive. We have made so many changes over the last 3 years and these changes have had a positive impact on our student outcomes. The highlights for the school were our connection to our community. This included a celebration of our Arts Programs. The Production and Arts Festival featured heavily in this discussion and while the Review focus in on the core subjects in schools, we were able to highlight the significance of our specialists and the skills that our students build through our specialist teachers.  

 

The implementation of new pedagogical instructional models and approaches to teaching Literacy and Numeracy was a key component of our success. As was the introduction and continued implementation of the Schoolwide Positive Behaviour Program.

 

From my perspective when the panel and I conducted class observations, it was incredibly clear that our students are working in a calm environment while demonstrating a strong academic emphasis in the way they worked and collaborated with their peers and teachers. Our teacher's capacity to teach was a standout for our panel and they were very impressed with the way our teachers approach learning and the way they interacted with their students to provide a calm and respectful learning environment. 

 

The Review concluded that the areas for improvement at WPS include;

  • Continuing to embed formative assessment in the classroom, to better inform the teacher about the immediate learning needs of each student in the delivery of a unit of work. 
  • We also need to work on our attendance data. We do have a lot of families that take time out of the term to travel, which means we have quite a few students with 20+ days absence in a year. Anything above 20 days is considered 'at risk' and the department are beginning to flag these students with schools. We will work towards improving this data over the 4 years of the new Strategic Plan.
  • We will continue the work on the implementation of the Numeracy Inquiry Model. This model is still in the implementation phase and we aim to embed over the next 12 - 18 months.
  • We continue the work in relation to the Schoolwide Positive Behaviour Program. 

I would like to thank Emma Clark, our School Council President, for attending the Review and taking time out of her working week to support our school. Thank you also to the teachers who opened up their classrooms for the panel to take a peek at what goes on inside the classrooms at WPS. I was very proud of the students and the staff last week and thank all of them for the great work they have done over the last 3 years. 

 

Take care and have a great weekend.

Nieta