Principal's Report
We look forward to tomorrow with anticipation as our VCE results are released. We are proud of all of our students who have completed Year 12. This in itself will lead to better life, health, social and emotional outcomes for each person when compared to young people who leave school early. Good luck girls!
Early 2017 VCE Success
The Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) have shortlisted Ashleigh Hammond and Lillianne Lords’ films for their annual celebration of the very best VCE films, “Top Screen”. We wish the girls every success to make the final cut. To make the short list in itself is a great achievement. Thank you to Roger Dunscombe our Year 12 Media expert and teacher.
Congratulations to Jo Jepsen who has four students shortlisted for VCE Top Designs! Well done to Sarah Betts, Emma Croker, Lilly Oshlack and Meshi Seymour-Pessah. We wish our students every success for the next two stages of selection for the Top Designs exhibition.
Thank you PA Uniform Shop!
Robynne Smith, Dem Peterson, Gailean Hammond, Sallie Carman, Sherri Vogel, Andrea Hughes and a wonderful support team of PA parents worked all day last Tuesday to fit hundreds of students in their uniforms for 2018. The washing, sorting, ironing, hanging, fitting and sales take an enormous amount of time and effort with all profits going to our students.
Further Student Success
Melbourne Girls’ College remains busy up to 22 December and beyond. Our Year 10 students have completed a very successful Work Experience week whilst twenty five emerging MGC scientists and engineers spent last week in the Lauriston Girls’ School FabLab and Library on a Digital Technologies project. Each student met with a client with a disability, consulted, planned, designed and built an aid to enhance their quality of life. The presentations on the final day of the project were outstanding.
Jaeda Mcpherson of Year 7 has won third place in the 7-8 category of the Australian Children’s Music Foundation’s National Song writing Competition, with an original song titled This Isn’t Fiction. Don Spencer, Founder and CEO of the ACMF, launched the National Song-writing Competition fifteen years ago to inspire creativity, imagination and self-expression in children. The ACMF National Song-writing Competition is Australia’s foremost youth song-writing competition. To hear Jaeda's song, and those of the other winners, please click on the link below:
http://acmf.com.au/winners-nsc-2017/
2018 Planning
This time of the year also sees the various staff movements which occur in a large State government system.
As Melbourne Girls’ has grown it has given us an opportunity to enlist the very best candidates in key teaching and support roles. We welcome a number of new staff including Amber Munro (English Language), Alice Dawes (English/Humanities), Luke Deery (Legal Studies/ Business Management), Charlotte Fu (Mathematics) Penelope Wilmot (Psychologist), Jeilei Cui (International Student Program Coordinator), Angie Ho (ISP Assistant) and Rachel Robertson (Leading Teacher). We welcome back Michael Newton, Meredith Carre, Lucy Chen, Anna Crosswhite and Erin Edgley. Sadly for us but most excitingly for Fitzroy Primary School, Tip Kennedy has been appointed acting Principal for term 1, 2018. Tip will do a fantastic job leading the school while the principal is on long service leave. We farewell those on leave, Patrice McCarthy for Semester One, Alan Clarke for 2018 and Katherine Bradshaw. We wish Kat every happiness as she anticipates the arrival of her baby. Farewell and thanks also to Liz Gunn, Lluani Williams, Amanda Trang, Sarah Lerpeniere, Ruth Gadsden, Rechelle Geyler, Indra Liepins and Andrea Macrae.
Reflection on being a Parent of MGC
At our 29 November Presentation Night Rose Lucas, our outgoing School Council Vice President, reflected on her experience as a parent of MGC. It is always a bitter sweet time when a youngest child graduates from high school. We thank Rose for her many years of service and wise counsel on School Council and as a very involved parent of the school, always there with a positive spirit and to support the school. We are fortunate to have many such parents.
Thanks. My name is Rose Lucas and I have been a parent representative on School Council for 6 years, the last two as Vice President. On the eve of my last child’s - and thus my -‘ graduation’ from MGC this year, I’d like to share some reflections about that experience.
A school is a complex social and structural organism. It has multiple layers, stakeholders and agendas – including individual students, student cohorts, teachers and discipline areas, leadership structures, parents, local community and government policy and administration. The dynamics are always rich, varied and they are often complicated. A school has buildings and policies and accreditation which pre-dates and outlasts any given student or even staff member; but it is also crucially defined by us -the people who come and go, who work and teach and learn and support within this living environment of the school. We all have a responsibility to make it work as well as possible.
When our child first enters high school we, as parents, are not surprisingly very focused on them as individual: who they are, what we think they need (now and later), how we hope they’ll fit in. We try to assess the school from the outside – the things we can quantify and the more general values and ‘vibe’ we can only guess at. As a 2 mum family, for instance, we were particularly to find a school that was open and inclusive.
What I have seen as my two very different girls made their way through the wonderful experience of MGC is that education is not just about the girls as individuals, their experience or their ATARs. It’s about where the individual girl meets the group and how that group meets her – in fact where she learns to interact with that complex organism of the school which itself operates as a microcosm of the wider world. And remember that in schools , as in life, nowhere is perfect all the time and not every experience will be ideal. How we learn to deal with those more difficult experiences are as important as having fantastic ones.
My experience on School Council – over 6 years, 2 principals, an evolving leadership team and staff, parent and community reps – has allowed me to see more closely into that wider picture: I’ve seen how the school works hard to care for both individual students as well as the wider school population of which they are a part. School Council also provides opportunity for thinking about and debating all the practical issues which go into supporting our girls and helping them to build the skills they need to launch - for example, talking about and approving camps, discussing issues related to Year 7 enrolment, hearing about and discussing initiatives within the school such as the Wellbeing Program and professional development for staff.
Council is not concerned with day to day operational activities but rather with helping to shape a school’s values and, as a representative group, to support staff and the leadership team by debating issues and vision for our terrific school. I can personally vouch that the debates at council are sometimes robust – but they are always respectful with everyone committed to the most positive and productive outcomes for the girls and for the school. Being on School Council also gives you amazing insight into how hard the school community and in particular the staff and leadership are working to continuously improve teaching practices and student experiences, to be fair and transparent in all its processes, to react constructively to the issues which will inevitably arise – politically, socially and because of how many unique personalities are talking and listening and learning and growing in this space called a school.
It’s a wonderful aspect of Government Schools that parents can contribute in this way; and while our roles as parents certainly change as our kids go from primary to secondary school it remains equally important to find ways, however small or large, to stay engaged with our child’s learning. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, years 7-12 are quite a journey for our girls, personally, socially, intellectually. Parents and school are in a partnership relationship to s