Principal's Report 

Improving Teaching and Learning  

With the school holiday break firmly behind us, the rhythm of school life has returned to normalcy. As is normal for a school of our size, this means that it is busy. Myriad activities are occurring across all parts of the school. The clubs program continues a pace, numerous interschool sporting teams have been out of the school, a range of fieldtrips have been occurring, and our musicians and production students have been steadily focussed on practice and rehearsal.  

Throughout this, the critically important work of teaching and learning continues. As does the work of continuing to improve teaching and learning so that students of Vermont Secondary College continue to education of the highest quality. Our plan for ongoing improvement can be understood in greater detail by reading our four-year School Strategic Plan and our 2026 Annual Implementation Plan. In simple terms our work is occurring in two areas.  

The first, is to strengthen our planned curriculum – the ‘what’ we teach. This is an ongoing, iterative process to ensure our curriculum reflects the Victorian Curriculum and the VCE Study Designs whilst drawing on our understanding of how students learn and how memory is developed. To support this work, all teachers are part of Learning Teams, where they together develop, reflect on and improve curriculum, design assessment tasks and classroom activities, and cross-mark and moderate to ensure that judgements are accurate. 

The second, is to continue to improve our pedagogy – the ‘how’ we teach. By improving our pedagogy our goal is to ensure that all students in our class are attending to the right things, have an opportunity to respond, to think, to have their understanding checked and to be held accountable for their learning. This work is supported by cross-faculty Professional Learning Communities (PLC) where teachers engage in professional learning, conduct inquiries around learning and engage in learning walks and classroom observations.  

Whilst within our school we have huge capacity across our staff to engage in this work, we have also invested heavily this year in teacher professional development through engagement with Bronwyn Ryrie Jones and her Responsive Teaching approach, an approach that has been shown to improve student outcomes.  

We are fortunate to be able to focus on improving teaching and learning in an environment that is calm, where students are engaged, and where families are supportive of the school and heavily invested in supporting their children to achieve the best possible outcomes.  

Thank you for your continued support of our school. 

Aidan Message

Acting Principal