PRINCIPAL'S REPORT

Dear Parents and Carers,

Welcome to the final newsletter for 2024.

It’s been a very significant year in the history of the Surf Coast Secondary College. This year was one of change and growth for our students and staff, the results of which have been outstanding.

I’ve written several times that this is year one of the College’s new four year School Strategic Plan (SSP). The plan has two goals, the first is ‘To improve the learning growth of every student’ and the second ‘To improve student engagement with their learning’. The plan was developed by an expert panel of education leaders, four of whom were external to the college, after a five day review of all aspect of our teaching, learning and wellbeing programs. Also taken into account was extensive feedback from students, staff and parents. The plan was underpinned by the introduction of a new college vision statement and new motto ‘Embrace challenge, achieve excellence’. The measures of excellence have certainly shown strong growth and improvement throughout the year.

The SSP required us to change many things that had previously been considered fundamental to SCSC teaching and learning programs. But the reality is that at times, things that may have been fit for purpose during the school’s foundation years, were no longer fulfilling their intentions and required rethinking. The challenges in actioning these changes cannot be understated, but it was impressive how well our staff and students stepped-up and took on this task.

This year our core work to support the new SSP included:

• Creating new leadership roles

• Developing a guaranteed and viable curriculum (GVC)

• Targeted leadership training

• New approaches to literacy and numeracy improvement

• New pedagogical model

• Deconstructing the FUSE program at Years 7-9

• Installing walls and doors to previously ‘open plan’ teaching spaces

• Opening up Compass ‘Chronicle’ entires to parents

• Introducing morning ‘Learning Advocate Time’ (LAT)

• Launching new student behaviour management processes

• Expanding the school wellbeing team

• Improving school attendance

• Enhancing transition connections with local primary schools

• Connecting to the Surf Coast shire and Torquay police to support students

The above list a just a selection of the new and enhanced work undertaken.

And the result of all this work? This year, in only the first year of our four year SSP, the college exceeded 10 out of 12 data targets linked to the student ‘Attitude to School Survey’, ‘School Staff Survey’ and ‘Parent Opinion Survey’. These college survey results shifted from their lowest during the period 2022/2023 to their highest this year. In 2024, both the staff and student anonymous surveys also had their highest participation rates ever (86% and 93% respectively) making these results both very valuable and extremely reliable.

In summary, our staff, students and parents are all reporting levels of positive endorsement of the work of our College that far exceeds the state average, the Barwon network of schools and our similar schools group (a selection of schools matched for socio-economc and parent education levels, size, location, etc.). In short, we are out performing other schools in many measures.

On the learning front we saw improvements in many key measures including a higher percentage of students showing above expected learning growth in literacy, higher Year 9 NAPLAN results in numeracy, and more students completing VCE and VCE VM. We also continued to see rising VCE study scores which were recognised by The Age newspaper who put us on the front page as part of their ‘Schools that Excel’ annual series.

It’s been an amazing year at Surf Coast Secondary College and we’ve all had so many reasons to celebrate the success of our young people!

Please enjoy reading through the rest of our final newsletter for the year. I hope you have found these newsletters informative throughout 2024. We look forward to bringing you more regular news into 2025.

Take care,

Shane Elevato

Acting Principal