Learning & Teaching News

New Staff

At the House Welcome Evenings, I had the opportunity to address many of our new parents and one of the ideas I conveyed was that while many in the local community want to send their children to St Peter’s College, it is refreshing to note that we are also a destination school for many staff members. I was able to assure the attending parents that all classes at both campuses were covered by ongoing or contract teachers and that casual relief teachers were only required in the event of an absence due to personal leave, excursions or professional learning events. This is reassuring as we know that students learn best when there is the stability of a regular committed teacher.  This reassurance may seem unusual as parents no doubt expect classes to be fully staffed when they send their child to school.

However, the reality is that many local schools have not yet employed the full complement of teachers and a number of classes remain without a regular teacher. Our positive experience can be attributed, in my opinion, to two main reasons.

Firstly, St Peter’s is a good place to work. The Catholic community is welcoming and supportive where gospel values of love, forgiveness and hope underpin our interactions with our colleagues and our students. It is not always perfect, but when we fail, we work at restoring relationships and making our workplace an enjoyable and rewarding place to be. 

Secondly, your children, our students, are good to teach. They are, in the vast majority, respectful and polite. Again, I am not suggesting that they are perfect, and I am sure parents know this better than me. We would like our students in many cases to have greater learning confidence - that is a belief that they are capable. It means viewing mistakes as learning opportunities. It involves not being afraid to have a go at something, as the words of our school motto remind them everyday. It involves a growth mindset where you believe you can face lifes challenges and get better at what you do. As teachers, we would also want our students’ work ethic to improve and the commitment to homework and study improve significantly. 

Alongside our new teachers, we work at making their transition into the St Peter’s College community as smooth as possible. This started with an induction at the end of last year. It involved three days of preparation before students returned to school this year. We have had a number of breakfast gatherings and an after school meeting ensuring that they are equipped to teach your children to the best of their abilities. What they have told us is that the students are wonderful to teach and the school is very supportive. In turn, what our new staff bring to us is a new energy and different insights that helps us continually improve.

It is important to realise that these new staff that are contributing so significantly to your child’s education are not just teachers but also Learning Support Officers (LSOs) and Numeracy Tutors. The important and hard work of the Learning Enrichment Team last year has resulted in a boost in numbers of our Learning Support Officers. We have employed 17 new LSOs to assist those students with significant learning needs in the classroom. 

The tutoring program has seen a significant decrease in government funding this year. This was a post-remote teaching initiative to help address the loss in learning for our students during the Covid lockdowns. Clearly, this program will be phased out, however, this year we have four tutors targeting our Year 7 & 8 Mathematics classes. The reason for this focus on numeracy is because our NAPLAN data indicates that our students enter Year 7 below the state mean in numeracy and it is crucial for us to accelerate this growth to prepare them for VCE.

We celebrate the addition of our new teachers, learning support officers and tutors to our school and hope you get to meet them over the course of the year.

Teaching Staff

Learning Support Officers

Sarah Cook

Maya Daniels

Jason Dingley

Simm Ebrahimi

Mikayala Hardy

Renee Halli

Georgia Manzat

Pallavi Mehrota

Preya Patwa

Samanthi Pereira

Sheba Quaraishi

Brianna Al-Hussein

Moksha Bhatt

Roma Jain

Harpreet Kaur

Christina Lobo

Beth Mitchell

Tutors

Yaseema Hettiarachchi

Sathya Rannulu

Prith Kour

Rupinderjit Narwal

Mr David Hansen

Deputy Principal - Learning & Teaching