Principal's Report

2025 Planning

If your family is planning some new horizons and will be moving for the 2025 school year, early notification greatly helps our planning of 2025 staffing and class arrangements. Notifying the office of a move as soon as possible is greatly appreciated.

Annual Parent & Caregiver Survey Reminder

As per the email reminder that went out via Compass today, all families are encouraged to participate in the annual Department of Education Parent & Carer Survey. Links and details of how to complete the survey are in the email, please contact the office if you did not receive this communication. The original survey invitation was sent out a fortnight ago to the parent or carer listed as 'Parent A' for each household in our system.

We sincerely thank all participants for your time in completing this survey, which generally takes around 10 minutes. Results are collected by the Department of Education and compared to schools across the state, our network and with schools with similar demographics to ours. As such, it forms a very useful metric that we use to monitor our strengths and areas of improvement.

The survey remains open until the 30th of August.

NAPLAN Results

Parents and carers have likely heard the news reports this week regarding the release of state and national NAPLAN results. While we always commit to looking for ways to continue to improve, the Roberts McCubbin Primary School results were encouraging in 2024.

In Year 5; students ranked as "strong" or "exceeding" were 20 percentage points above the state level in Reading, Grammar and Punctuation, and Numeracy, while also sitting clearly ahead of our similar and network schools. (Similar schools are schools across the state with similar socio-economic backgrounds to our families.) In Writing and Spelling, students were level with the state result for "strong" or "exceeding". In terms of growth data, students achieved growth above the state average for both Reading and Numeracy, while being at or above the average for our similar and network schools.

In Year 3; Writing, Spelling, Numeracy, and Grammar and Punctuation were all clearly above the state averages for "strong" or "exceeding" results, while being ahead of our similar schools and around equal to our network schools. Reading was level with the state average this year.

Much has been said in the media about students achieving results of "developing" or "needs additional support", with around 30% of students across the state being placed in these categories. Our strongest result in this sense was in Year 5 Reading, where only 6% of students were in these lowest two categories. In all other areas, our "developing" or "needs additional support" students made up between around 10% to 25% of the Year 3 and Year 5 cohorts, with two areas matching the state level of 30%.

Staff engage with our NAPLAN data at both an individual and a cohort level, comparing results to our other assessments, looking for areas in which all students can improve. Recently, we hosted data analyst Emma McNamara from SREAMS to work with teams in looking at data, with a team of staff shortly heading off to the Network "NAPLAN Roadshow" event to delve even deeper.

Outside of these one-off occasions, staff engage in weekly "Professional Learning Communities" (PLCs), where the focus is on looking at data sets with a view to inform lesson planning to ensure all students are being taught at their point of need.

Peter Watson

Principal