Principal's Report

We have reached the end of Term 1 and I want to thank all of our staff for the incredibly hard work they have put into supporting all of our students. The staffing crisis in Victoria and especially the Wyndham Area has impacted all of us here at Tarneit Senior College and our staff have been working incredibly hard to try and support as many of our students as possible including taking extra classes, double classes, preparing work for classes without designated teachers and following up with marking and feedback for those classes. This hard work and dedication deserves the accolades of our community and I want to make sure that our parents and students know that every one of our staff is working to support our situation the best they can.

We are currently working with the Department and multiple agencies on some coverage especially in English. We are hopeful through communications with some agencies of at least getting some temporary teaching positions filled in the English and Vocational Major space.

These staffing challenges are continuing across a number of schools in Wyndham and despite being placed on the Emergency Teacher Placement Initiative we are still working hard to find viable teaching candidates.

Principals To Parliament

To further enlighten our politicians around the staffing issues in Wyndham and Tarneit Senior College I participated in a program by meeting with our local MP, Dylan Wight, at Parliament House. We are trying to get support in a range of different ways to entice teachers into Wyndham and Tarneit to help support our school community. The visit was successful and I am hopeful of some positive outcomes and voices from Parliament for our cause.

Census

We had the census completed on 29th February this term and our official numbers for 2024 as part of the census is 1085.2 which forms the basis of our 2024 funding. This is a slight decrease from last year which was 1127.

Parent Teacher Conferences

On Thursday 14th March and Friday 15th March, we held our Parent Teacher Conferences. It was wonderful to see so many families taking the opportunity to discuss the learning of their children and hear about the successes and little wins in each classroom. We were pleased that we had over 1100 bookings over the 2 sessions.

MP Joanne Ryan Visit

We were delighted to welcome our Federal Member of Parliament, Joanne Ryan, to Tarneit Senior College on Friday 15th March. Ms. Ryan was keen to see how the school has used its successful Library Upgrade Grant funding to improve our Library space and provide an environment that fosters learning, collaboration, and study. We also spent time exploring our new building spaces and took the opportunity to showcase the plans for our paddock area as a potential community sports hub with soccer, rugby, and basketball courts accessible to our students and the wider community.

Focus on Learning Environment

The start of 2024 has seen us work hard with our students and staff to create a positive learning environment that fosters a safe and challenging classroom. As a school, we have put a strong focus on the continued implementation of our Mobile Phone policy. This was recently celebrated at all Area Principal Forums by the Deputy Secretary David Howes. I have received multiple communications from Principals across multiple areas sending messages of congratulations to our school for the approach and recognition of the work. 

We are also continuing to push expectations around uniforms for our students. It is important that we maintain a high expectation around uniforms for 2 main reasons - safety and building an understanding of expectations. We have spoken to our students about the need to easily identify students on school grounds allowing staff and students to easily identify anyone who should not be on school grounds to maintain our safety. The other area we discussed with our students around uniforms is the building of habits. A lot of our students moving into the workforce will have a level of expectation on what they wear and our uniform is a way for them to build habits to support this.

Lateness

The next area of focus for us as a school is lateness. We are seeing patterns of lateness across all of our student cohorts - both being late to school and also late to class. We will be working with our staff and student leaders on approaches to reinforce our expectations of punctuality, respecting the classrooms, and being on time.