From the Principal

Annual Meeting and Interactive Bilingual Lesson

We were pleased to welcome parents and carers to our Annual Public Meeting last week, where I shared our 2024 Annual Report. Among the many highlights, our school was ranked High by the Department of Education in the Learning domain of the School Performance Report. This measures performance on NAPLAN assessments in Reading and Numeracy, NAPLAN relative growth, and Teacher judgement growth for Literacy and Mathematics.

We achieved pleasing improvements across a range of NAPLAN measures last year; meeting, and in many cases exceeding our targets. For example, The percentage of students in Strong or Exceeding in Year 5 Reading improved by 7.7%. Our Year 5 Numeracy target was to increase the percentage of students Exceeding from 11% in 2023 to 16%; but we actually achieved an impressive 29%. This year’s data shows continued improvement in Numeracy growth too, which is great.

Our parent/ carer opinion data shows consistently positive responses across all measures, and we are very grateful for the ongoing support and trust of our school community! We work really hard to encourage as many responses to this survey as possible, so we can be responsive to what our families are saying and continue to improve. The 2025 Parent Caregiver Guardian Opinion Survey (PCGOS) is now open, and you will have received a link via email this week. Your feedback is important to us, so we encourage you to please set aside 20 minutes to complete the survey.

The Link to the Annual Meeting slides is here if you were not able to attend. The full Annual Report can be accessed via our website.

Following this presentation, we moved into the fun stuff! Nancy and Chiara did a sensational job facilitating an interactive, bilingual numeracy lesson - and our parent/ carer participants were exemplary students! It was a pleasure to offer this first-hand experience of learning through our bilingual model, providing just a taste of the engaging environment your children thrive in every day!

L’area Degli Amici - Working Bee Aug 30th

Our Inclusion Space (L’area Degli Amici) is now open! Our marvellous Environment Sub-committee will be holding a Working Bee on August 30th to complete the finishing touches - save the date! This will include installing around 300 beautifully hand-painted tiles created by our students (grazie Anna!) on the wall, and a mosaic kaleidoscope design at the base of the deck. We’ll hold a grand opening celebration next month once it’s all finished and looking amazing. Again, this is only possible thanks to the generosity of our community, and the contributions to the kitty via the Building Fund, Ciao Downs, Trivia Night and so on. 

Science Week and Book Week

It’s been a fun-filled fortnight of exciting, creative and engaging learning as we launched ourselves into both Science Week and Book Week! Our inaugural Science Week Cake Comp had around 90 absolutely astro-nom-nom-nomical entries! Our Book Week Parade was a colourful extravaganza once again; a wonderful celebration of 80 years of Book Week. Thank you to both Eileen and Maree for making it all happen!

Ciao for now, Kristie