Principal's News

Welcome Back

Welcome back to our families and our school community, I do hope that the midyear break provided an opportunity for you to recharge, for many families that travelled and escaped the cold weather I do envy your pursuit of the warmer weather and it was nice to hear about some fun holiday stories from our students as they recounted their travels to Queensland, Bali and Western Australia this week. 

This term, whole school newsletters will be circulated on the 25th July, 8th, 22nd August, 5th and 19th September. Area newsletters will be circulated on the 1st and 29th August. We will continue to look to use schoolstream to communicate regularly with our school community and keep you informed throughout what is proving to be a busy and exciting term ahead.    

We have also added a learning focus to our newsletter with contributions from our teaching leaders, Morita sensei, Onda sensei and Miss Ryan and resumed our wellbeing contributions with fortnightly contributions from Mrs Weston. 

Maintenance

Over the school holiday break, we have had substantial maintenance work in the school delivered by the Victorian School Building Authority (VSBA), this work has included roofing and tile work, electrical work, floor sanding, painting. Pending work to be completed includes upgrades to the retaining wall on Cedar Street. We will continue to marry this up with school led upgrades to occur over this term including carpet replacements, electrical upgrades and we continue to work on our playground upgrades. On the final day of term, I was able to submit a grant application to the VSBA for consideration to be made for student bathroom refurbishments. 

Policy Updates

The Department of Education has updated policy effective from the 21 July 2025. Under Ministerial Order 1125 – Procedures for Suspension and Expulsion in Government Schools, principals will have the power, in exceptional circumstances, to suspend or expel students where incidents that occur outside of school activity, particularly online, significantly impacting the health, safety and wellbeing of students or staff at school. 

These powers apply only to serious incidents where there is a clear and close connection to the school and the behaviour of a student outside of school unreasonably impacts the safety and wellbeing of students or staff at school, and their ability to learn or work. Please note: 

• They do not apply to behaviours unrelated to the school or school community.

Suspension and expulsion will remain measures of last resort – our primary approach continues to focus on proactive and positive behaviour support, including working with you to teach students the behaviours we expect of them, in school and in life.

Naplan Outcomes

The school has this week received our 2025 Naplan reports and have distributed individual reports to year 3 and 5 families. From my perspective, I have always looked to use this cohort data for a comparative analysis for how the school is performing in relation to the network, similar schools and the state of Victoria. At this stage, some statewide data is still getting finalised. 

Our school sits within the SaGE network of schools, a cluster of schools that are one of the highest performing networks in the state, I have always looked to benchmark our learning outcomes directly referencing our network schools. Whilst we are a bilingual school, we are never looking to use this as an excuse for aspiring to high performance outcomes in our teaching and learning programs. 

‘Similar Schools’ data is not comparing bilingual schools with bilingual schools but rather comparing schools with a similar SFOE background to Caulfield Primary School. The SFOE index of our school identifies the Student Family Occupation and Education status of families and allows schools to be directly comparing with similar status schools. 

The data below identifies a very strong set of results in both year 3 and year 5 with outcomes consistently at level with the network. Year 5 data in all testing areas Reading, Writing, Spelling, Numeracy and Grammar and Punctuation is above network and similar schools with reading, spelling and Grammar and Punctuation data 10% or more beyond our network average. 

2025 Year 3 Naplan Data

Percentage of students Exceeding or Strong

2025 Year 5 Naplan Data

Percentage of students Exceeding or Strong

Graphics below details the schools performance in Year 5 numeracy and reading, the purple bars are all individual similar schools, whilst the blue bars are network schools and our school is represented in orange. Our Year 5 reading data for exceeding and strong percentages identifies the school as the highest performing school amongst 41 similar or network schools, a wonderful achievement and a great to our teaching staff. 

The data is incredibly strong and is a great reflection of the work that we put into our teaching and learning programs and the efforts of our teachers and education support staff. It also helps to further validate the benefits of bilingual education when you take into account that our students are learning all mathematics in Japanese and learning literacy in both English and Japanese. 

ThinkUKnow

The school has partnered with Victoria Police and the Proactive Policing Unit and Youth Resource officers to work with our students this term delivering three sessions to our Year ½’s, Year ¾’s and Year 5/6’s. ThinkUKnow presentations for students are aligned to the Victorian curriculum to ensure they are age-appropriate and relevant to students’ learning.

Topics included within the presentation are specifically aimed at educating and increasing awareness about online child sexual exploitation including avoiding inappropriate contact, online grooming, self-generated content, sexual extortion and how to get help. It is wonderful opportunity to engage with experts in this area and allow students the opportunity to ask questions, seek answers and find out a little more about what they can do to be safe and aware in online environments. 

Friday Yoga

We are putting out something different this term and a chance to join us for four free yoga classes on Friday. Delivered by two accredited yoga teachers, this is a chance for staff and parents to join us for a free 45min slow flow class. It might be the perfect chance to let go at the end of a busy week or try yoga for the first time if you haven’t done it before. 

You can drop in for one session or come along to all of them if you’d like. 

• Session 1 – 15th August – 3:45pm – 4:30pm – Instructor: Avelyn Lim
• Session 2 – 22nd August – 3:45pm – 4:30pm - Instructor: Avelyn Lim
• Session 3 – 12th September – 7:45am – 8:30am – Instructor: Olivia Gibson
• Session 4- 19th September – 7:45am – 8:30am – Instructor: Olivia Gibson

School Production – Ticketing

Our school production tickets will go on sale in the coming weeks but we wanted to ensure you had information provided to you that supported you to purchase these tickets. Tickets will be available for both an afternoon and an evening performance with an initial maximum of two tickets per family available for purchase. This ensures that all families have the opportunity to purchase tickets for either show. The Kingston Arts Centre has determined that fixed and allocated seating must be included in sales so each ticket will have a fixed seat number. After an initial period of sales where every family has had the opportunity to purchase tickets, remaining tickets will be available with no maximum number available. This is the fairest way to ensure all families can attend both either performance and also operate within the guidelines of the venue on the day and evening. 

School Review

The school has received a draft copy of our school review report and is awaiting this to be finalised. We look forward to sharing the details of our final report with ours staff, students and our school community.

Staffing Update – Term 3

I extend my sincere thanks to Emily Stuart who finishes in her role with us today and to Tomomi Coster who is beginning a period of leave shortly for the remainder of this year. Both staff members are very valued members of our Education Support team. We have undertaken recruitment processes this morning and once again on Monday and looking forward to welcoming new staff to our school and sharing this with you soon. A warm welcome to Mrs Weston who has commenced in the school this week, Mrs Weston works with us on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday in our Wellbeing and Inclusion role. 

Professional Learning

Our staff continue to invest in professional learning to support their skills and to benefit our classrooms and students. This term, Mrs Curlewis and Ms Guzman continue to work with 26 teachers in The Academy of Teaching and Leadership Emerging Leaders program. I am facilitating this program working with 3 other local principals and am greatly appreciative of their commitment to this work. 

Morioka sensei is also learning with the ‘The Academy’ undertaking a suite of professional learning on leadership over the remainder of this year, this is a great opportunity for Miharu to work with other assistant principals and school leaders from around Victoria. 

I am also presenting a series of professional learning for the department of education on Learning Difficulties including Dyslexia, this is a course that I have run for the department for over 10 years and helps develop and support teachers and education support staff to build capacity to support literacy in their classrooms. 

A Great First Week

There are plenty of events and activities happening around the school in the first week back, I have really enjoyed the opportunity to visit our classrooms, I spent some time with Miss Pyrcz and Miss Ryan this week, with our Year 3/4s working on their letter writing and our wonderful prep students participating in our structured phonics approach and working on their dictation (handwriting), the progress they are making is incredible, we have a cohort of writers that are beginning to form structured sentences with legible, purposeful handwriting – well done Preps! 

Principals’ Day 

Next Friday is Principals’ Day, it is a real privilege to be a principal or assistant principal in any school and I feel really fortunate to be a principal at our school and work alongside our staff and school community. I am really proud of the work we lead and the commitment our staff make to our school. 

There are fantastic principals and assistant principals in our school system. They do really care and they are are doing the best job that they can, sometimes in really challenging situations. They are often the first reponder to critical incidents, trauma or grief which can be an isolating and difficult position. 

Workload is a challenge in so many of your professional responsibilities and some astonishing data I read recently from the ‘Independent Review of administrative and compliance activities in Victorian government schools’. The average principal receives 300 emails per week, if each email took 90 seconds to read and action (a very optimistic estimate), then an average principal would be occupied for a full 8 hours per week just on emails. At 8 minutes per email response this time grows to 40 hours per week. It is a job that I really love and I enjoy the opportunity to work with you and your family each day. 

Enjoy a great weekend, thanks for supporting such a terrific first week of Term 3. 

I hope to see you around the school. 

Edward Strain

Principal