Principal's Update
We have had an exciting start to Term 2 this year, with a couple of college projects coming to life and a busy school review over the past month.
The Café and Canteen
We opened our new, onsite café to staff and Year 12s this term with resounding feedback and positivity. Together with our strong focus on culture, The Café helps ensure Lowanna College is the premier destination for teachers and school staff to work in. It also provides a new privilege for our Year 12s, as they transition from their teenage years into responsible young adults. It has been fantastic to partner with Fat Cat Coffee for all of our wholesale needs, including coffee beans, cups, barista-quality milks, coffee syrups and fine teas. The Café serves a wide variety of slices as well as lunch items available from the canteen in a café style setting (focaccias, handmade wraps, etc). Year 12s and staff can purchase items from the café using cash or their Compass ID card via Compass Pay.
A further exciting development was seeing our students working in our canteen for the first time last week. A dozen students have expressed interest for our first intake, with students provided training and a canteen/café voucher for their short shifts. This helps immensely with timely service to our students, as the sales in the canteen have increased by 450% since we took over in January. It is a testament to the work undertaken by our Canteen Manager Jodie and our Canteen Assistant Marcelle – the food is fresh, natural and handmade. From hand-crumbed real chicken breast in our wraps, to home-made cookies, to highly popular all-natural fruit-based slushies (don’t tell the students they’re actually good for them!).
Junior Toilets
Our new Junior School toilets opened this term too, after a complex build process. As mentioned previously, the full redesign was based on student feedback. We now have individual cubicles fully sealed from floor to ceiling, together with electronic access via Compass ID card. Feedback from students has been exceptionally positive, and we are now in the process of exploring a similar concept for our Middle School and Senior School toilet blocks. It has been a privilege to deliver a once-in-a-generation improvement for our students, particularly for a project that had to come from carefully managed internal college funds. With brand new, modern toilets, it has been made clear to our students that to deliver on our promise there will be significant consequences for anyone who misuses or damages the new toilets… 99% of students told us they just want a clean toilet to use, and they deserve nothing less.
School Review
Finally, but significantly, our college just concluded our four-year strategic review with the Department of Education. The review was chaired by an independent education expert, and we were fortunate to have two-highly skilled ‘challenge partners’ on the panel… seeking the best across the state I invited Dr. Marcia Devlin AM – CEO of the Victorian Academy of Teaching and Leadership, and Mr. Robert Pyers, former principal of Horsham Secondary College and the 2023 Victorian Principal of the Year. Both, together with our network leader (SEIL) and reviewer, spent numerous days over three weeks engaging with students, parents, staff and the community to understand the context of our college. Similarly, they spent days reviewing our performance data, our curriculum documentation and our teaching quality in our classrooms.
The review was exceptionally positive, with the panel commending the incredible progress across the college over the past five years, particularly given the pandemic in the middle. Some students shared how the college felt completely different, while the panel acknowledged the investment in leadership development and the quality in our classrooms. They highlighted our significant shift in performance, particularly for literacy, numeracy and culture – all areas moving from the lowest Department performance level (transform) to the highest level (influence).
As I have said many times over the years, I am incredibly grateful to the staff, students, parents and community for supporting us with this transformation. It has been a team and community wide effort to grow a college that is now often spoken about across Gippsland in high regard.
The work is never done, however, and a key part of the review is determining what the next four years will look like. The review panel provided us with some key insight and suggestions, which included an ongoing focus on high-quality teaching, school-wide literacy, and further imbedding the School-Wide Positive Behaviour Support framework. Our next steps are to work together as a staff and student population to build and refine the next strategic plan, establish specific key improvement strategies, and set ambitious but achievable targets. I look forward to sharing it with you as we work through this process.
Staffing at Lowanna College
We have had a challenging term – one of our more complex ones, with an inability to source Casual Relief Teachers. This is part of the statewide shortage of teachers at the moment. I am incredibly grateful for our existing workforce who have routinely taken cover classes above their usual allotment to keep the college operating seamlessly. We have been active in our recruitment for next semester, and have seven staff joining us either at or before the start of Term 3. Effectively this gives us much greater spread across the timetable and will allow us to cover classes internally without our staff going above and beyond. Speaking with other principals who are in much more challenging situations, it is a testament to our culture that we have been able to keep our timetable covered right through the staffing shortage to date. We’re fortunate to have such an incredible team of staff here at Lowanna College.
Adam Hogan
College Principal