Reconciliation Week

This week is National Reconciliation Week. This is an opportunity for our entire school community, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, to reflect on our shared history and consider our way forward through local actions that support the national agenda of reconciliation. The Beaufort Secondary College community acknowledges and pays our respects to the traditional owners, the Wadawurrung people, whose country we are on and we would also like to extend our respect to their Elders, both past and present.

NAPLAN

Our Year 7 and 9 students participated in NAPLAN testing over the course of last week. Thank you to Ms McGinty and Mr de Zoete Spiero for organising and administering the test for our students, as well as all of the other staff who played a role in guiding and supporting the students in taking part in the Nation-wide Testing of students. Well done to our students for the way in which they participated in the three days of testing, which covered the key areas of Literacy and Numeracy. The results of the NAPLAN will assist us in learning more about our students and their individual learning needs. We will use the results to help us identify strengths in our students, as well as areas for improvement and by doing this we can target skills for further development. We have been very pleased with the way in which previous NAPLAN result have demonstrated our ability as a school to achieve strong learning growth from Year 7 to Year 9.

Curriculum Day

We had a very successful Curriculum Day last Friday. We spent part of the day participating in a self evaluation of our teaching and learning processes and examining our climate for learning. All government schools take part in a review process every four years. Our school will be reviewed in Term 3 of this year and as a result we have begun evaluating our achievements and areas that we believe we can improve upon. We will be seeking feedback from students, staff, parents and community in order to ensure we have a good understanding of our school from all perspectives. At the conclusion of the review, we will establish a four year Strategic Plan that will guide our focus and our work into the future.

We also spent part of the Curriculum Day focusing on our classroom environment, which is at the centre of our Instructional Model (a guide for our teaching processes). Ms Moore took the staff through teaching and learning strategies that will assist with a positive and engaging classroom environment for our students. Our teachers will be adding these strategies to their repertoire and observing each other putting these into practice in their lessons. We do this so that we continue to learn and improve as educators in delivering a quality learning experiences for our students. Thanks to Ms Moore for her work in preparing and delivering this professional learning to our staff.

The last part of the day was spent on developing our curriculum, particularly for our Middle Years program. We are very pleased with the progress we have made in delivering this new program for our Year 9 and 10 students. The subject offerings are more tailored to individual student interests and future pathways, and aim to provide engaging options for our students to choose from as they make their way into the senior years of school.

Ballarat Choral Festival

I had the pleasure of listening to our school choir sing at the Choral Festival in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Ballarat on the weekend. They did an outstanding job – producing an amazing sound and receiving lots of very positive feedback. It is a huge commitment of both time and energy from Mrs McKelvey, who leads our choir and it is greatly appreciated. We also appreciate the effort and involvement of Mrs Evans and Mrs Doyle, who sing with and support the choir. Our students, who volunteer to participate in the choir, were the stars and I admire their ability to perform at such a high level time and time again.

BSC Uniform Policy