Principal's Report 

Social Media

A current news item is the legislation of sixteen years becoming the minimum age for social media access.  While any news to support our children being protected and educated about their social media journey is good, we also know that is not a one stop fix.

The role social media is playing in the lives of our children and young adults is significant, and like a lot of things both positive and negative outcomes can come from this.  Our quest as a society is to eliminate/minimise the negative and to support and celebrate the positive.

While the battle continues to conquer this quest, it is through small steps.  Without any other details, the one thing that this legislation does do is provide parents/carers with a law.  When in the midst of a conversation about social media access, parents/carers can now say, ‘It is against the law’ in a similar way when talking about vaping, alcohol and underage driving.  It is no longer simply adults saying to kids, ‘I am not allowing you’. A small step but a handy one for us parents.

At Friday’s assembly, I spoke briefly about this and pointed out to the students that the law is not to punish them but to restrict the untrustworthy elements (whether individual or organisation) who were misusing social media platforms to either access children or to provide un-acceptable content for this age group.

From the school’s point of view our biggest focus is education so students can make safe and assertive decisions when presented with inappropriate moments.  There are three main areas for this –

1. Being able to critic the appropriateness and accuracy of content (both information and interactions)
2. Awareness of the fakes and impersonators and how to respond to remain safe
3. Understanding themselves as an individual (both needs and strengths) – connection, purpose, attention/acceptance, resilience – and how these impact their online behaviour and management of inappropriate moments.

In 2025 the school is partnering with Inform and Empower (https://www.informandempower.com.au), an accredited digital cybersafety and wellbeing program.  Classes will have sessions scheduled throughout the year and it will also include a parent/carer face to face session early in the year (Feb 12).  The program is being provided to the Windsor Community for free with the support of the Windsor Bendigo Community Bank.  Our gratitude to them for their constant and consistent support of Windsor Primary School.

2025 Planning

As we move into planning mode for 2025 the school is happy to announce that we will be maintaining our six-class model, even though we do not have the enrolments for this structure. The main reason is the community’s preference for a straight Prep class as part of our structure.  The model means that school will need to finance the portion of staffing that is over the Department of Education’s funding allocation.

In 2025 we have also decided to introduce Science as a specialist subject that all students will participate in for an hour a week.  Science was a part of our integrated/inquiry component of our curriculum, and we would focus on Science at least twice a year, however with this dominance of teaching time and the extremely high positive response from the students when we do Science topics, we are going to trial it as an all year round subject.