School Review Update

I presented some of this information to our School Advisory Council at the end of last term and wanted to share it with our whole school community.

In summary, Stephen Russell, our external reviewer was complimentary of our school culture, student academic achievement and student engagement and wellbeing.

To recapture the process, every four years all catholic schools are required to undergo a review which is facilitated by an external reviewer who is not an employee of Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools (MACS). The process involves extensive self reflection by the staff across the five spheres of; Religious Dimension, Learning and Teaching, Leadership and Management, Student Engagement (previously Student Wellbeing) and School Community. 

The process commenced prior to our school closure days back in March around the labour day long weekend and continued with visits from Stephen Russell, the external reviewer who works for national Curriculum Services. When visiting St James, Stephen met with all staff members, a representative of students and quite a large representative of parents. He also walked around the school and through classrooms making observations. Stephen also read our staff self-reflection where we rated ourselves on a rubric assigned to each of the five spheres and had a very in depth look into our achievement data via NAPLAN, internal assessments, diagnostic assessments and surveys conducted over the past four years.

Stephen then drafted a report which he presented to our Leadership Team and some key MACS stakeholders. 

From the above description it can be concluded that the entire process was extremely thorough and personally, I have faith in the accuracy of the final report and Stephen’s findings.

Here is a link to the Executive Summary  and Strengths and Opportunities from the report.

Importantly for our community, particularly staff and parents, to be aware of was the academic findings Stephen was able to present given he has access to research, results and statistics that we don't have access to.

He compared our St James results to those of catholic schools in similarly based socio economic areas of Melbourne. This is more relevant to us given that our socio economic status and early learning of our students prior to coming to school here in Vermont should result in NAPLAN scores above the national, state and MACS average. 

We certainly achieve this, but a common question we as a staff have asked ourselves is, “How much value do we add to our student’s education compared to what would be reasonably expected?” We now have the answer to this question and the results speak very well for our St James students and for the job our St James staff are doing for your children.

For those parents familiar with how a normal distribution bell curve is presented, Stephen summarised by simply shifting the bell curve to the right hand side of the page by a few centimetres. Basically this illustrated that we have very few students in the lower percentile rankings (6% compared to Australian average of 23%) and have many students in the higher percentile rankings (38% compared to Australian average of 23%).

Below is a graphic that Stephen shared with us which summarises our results in both National Assessment Plan Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) which all Year 3 and 5 students across Australia sit and our Progress Achievement Tests (PAT) which are is a diagnostic test which all our Yr 1 - 6 students sit. He compared the expected level of achievement with approximately 15 other melbourne catholic schools in very similar socio economic areas (similar DMI and ICSEA ratings).

If we, at St James,  had achieved the expected level of growth as a summary from year to year then there would be nothing wrong with that and we might investigate how to add that extra few percentage points to grow our students even further. Instead, what Stephen discovered is that in most areas our students have displayed higher than expected growth. In fact, Stephen described St James as in the top 5% of schools who achieve this growth consistently over a five year period in multiple learning domains. As the Principal of St James, this is one of the most rewarding aspects of the entire review.