Principal's Report

Today we celebrated the Feast of St. Mary Help of Christians Mass. On behalf of the local branch of St Vincent de Paul, we thank all of our families for their kind and generous donations of non-perishable goods which will be of high value for our local Glen Innes people doing it tough at the moment. In Father Thaddeus’ absence we were privileged to have Father Gleeson return and celebrate the Eucharist and deliver his usual “child-friendly” Homily that explains and contextualizes the scripture readings and the importance of Mary as our model of deep faith and a constant advocate for our needs and the needs of the poor and marginalized.

Term 2 PAT testing for Reading and Mathematics occurs over the next week or so. As I have stated previously, these types of national benchmarking assessments allow our teams of skilful helpful adults to “check-in” on our children's academic progress against national standards to determine their individual next steps for learning at the RIGHT time in Term 2 each year. For a high proportion of our kids, their next steps are all about extension and stretching themselves from good to great! For others it allows us to check the ”gaps” so we can backtrack and re-teach some of the more difficult concepts that have not yet been fully understood. Essentially a far different and more positive learning orientation to “tests” and “assessments” then we adults went to school where it was “PASS-FAIL” and the teaching just kept “grinding on” regardless!? Well done again to our great teaching and learning teams for their skilful application of these assessments and future learning steps.

This is a further advance warning and reminder that two Pupil Free days are coming up on Thursday 6 June and Friday 7 June. The school will not be open to students on those two days as teachers participate in professional learning that continues to grow and develop the evidence-proven pedagogical capacity of our team of skilful helpful adults. Note these two days intentionally “tack on” to the King’s Birthday public holiday on Monday 10 June, so that families may choose to have a short 5-day break without impacting school attendance.

Until next time.

May God go with you.

Geoff McManus

Principal