PRINCIPAL'S REPORT

Dear Parents and Carers,

Welcome to the latest edition of our College newsletter.

Welcoming New Students.

On day one of term three it was our great pleasure to welcome 21 new students and their families to the SCSC community. These new students are spread across Years 7-10. This is in addition to the 11 new students who joined us throughout semester one. Most of our new students are transitioning to SCSC from nearby private and religious schools.

Feedback from new families is that this ongoing growth in our student population is emblematic of community support for our new strategic direction and is a testament to the dedication of our teaching team in their application of high impact teaching and wellbeing strategies across the College. Many new parents have shared how positively current parents and students are speaking about their experiences at our school.

Sometimes unexpected growth can create ‘pressure points’ with class sizes and this is happening in some year levels this semester. That said, this increase of student enrolments will allow us to redesign structures for 2026 with more classes running and slightly reduced class sizes. I thank everyone in advance for their patience as we manage an unprecedented time of growth at the College.

NAPLAN Results.

The 2025 NAPLAN results are in and I am happy to report that our recent upward trend has continued. The data we track is Year 9 Reading, Writing and Numeracy. We focus on Year 9 as this is largely a reflection of the work of teachers and students during the two years of Year 7 and 8.

This year we have continued to see more SCSC students in the ‘Strong’ and ‘Exceeding’ categories than in previous years. Our College is performing higher than state and network averages in most areas, matching our ‘similar schools’ group in most and we are performing better than our ‘similar schools’ group in writing for the first time. Our writing growth has seen a significant improvement in the last two years thanks to a range of new writing programs introduced across the junior school in addition to a targeted focus on handwriting.

The following graphs give a clear indication of our improving proficiency levels:

These improving levels of reading, writing and numeracy proficiency in our Year 9 cohorts are a testament to our new pedagogical approaches in Years 7, 8 and 9. The implementation of our ‘explicit direct instruction’ model of teaching and our ‘guaranteed and viable curriculum’ are clearly having a positive impact on student learning.

I’d like to congratulate our Year 9 students on an excellent collective effort as well as give my thanks to our junior school staff on achieving these great results. We will continue to work tirelessly in our pursuit of these year-on-year improvements.

Academic Excellence Subject Awards.

At last week’s whole school assembly we acknowledge a large number of students across the college who have maintained assessment task score averages above 85% with ‘Academic Excellence Subject Awards’. Students who have maintain assessment task averages above 80% in any subject will be acknowledged in upcoming year level assemblies because there were just too many of them to have the time to celebrate them all in a whole school assembly!

It really is so pleasing to see such a large number of our students embracing challenge and achieving excellence across all year levels, subjects and learning programs. My sincere thanks and congratulations to all those students who received an award and to the teachers who provide such excellent learning experiences for our young people.

I hope you enjoy reading the rest of this edition of our College newsletter.

Take care.

Shane Elevato

Principal.