Student Leadership 2024

2024 has marked a considerable evolution in the student voice and leadership program at Sandy, with the student leadership team, led by Learning Specialist for Student Voice Agency and Leadership Tim Clifton, holding weekly meetings to discuss and create changes within the school. This semester has seen the fruition of several exciting and necessary developments within the College, all thanks to the students themselves, as placing a continual focus on the needs of the students has resulted in a large increase of initiatives and overall involvement within the leadership program.  

One of our major goals this semester has been to encourage and allow student input and involvement into the changes made to the College, regardless of being an official ‘leader’ within the program, or not. To do this, we have placed numerous suggestion boxes around the school to receive feedback on real issues, and have seen great success with this already, with comments ranging from asking for more hand soap in the bathrooms, to suggesting changes to the school uniform, to improving the schools’ work experience program, and even to suggesting fundraising ideas. 

Term 2 has seen the opening of the new Year 12 Common Room, offering a private study space for Year 12’s to use in their free periods, and a social center for the year group during break times. We would like to thank everyone who attended the working bee for this project; we couldn’t have done this without the help of our amazing Sandy community. 

 - Holloway Road Campus Vice Captain: Madeleine Burnet.

Student leadership have had a great term so far and have much more to look forward to. Firstly, we’ve had student run meetings every week and have also joined with the peer support team and SRC. We have been working on introducing a school beanie and had students vote on their favourite design, this will be introduced in early term 3. We have also looked at the idea of having can and bottle bins around the school as part of the VIC container deposit scheme which we will implement shortly too. This is to help reduce rubbish and provides us with some extra money to put towards the student leadership team. This will be great because we will be able to have funds to help the ideas for our school come to life.

Another thing that started this term is the student suggestion box where we have already had many great ideas that we have begun trying to implement. The student suggestion box gives all students a chance and an opportunity to have a say. It is encouraged immensely if students have a suggestion for the school to put it in the box. Students are also reminded that all suggestions are anonymous and all suggestions are welcomed. Finally we had some forums discussing the ATOSS survey that helped us educate students about what questions to expect from the survey and how the data worked. This forum that was run before the ATOSS survey was of a small group of students chosen by the teachers to give feedback to Mr. Clifton and Ms. McElwee regarding how students interpret and understand what the questions on the ATOSS survey mean to them. This showed how the interpretation of the questions can vary and helped provide a greater understanding of what the ATOSS survey means to us as students. 

The school wide community was also part of the decision making process of what the Sandringham College beanie will be, the student leadership team sent out a Microsoft forms on compass to the students and teachers and they were able to choose from 6 beanie designs what they would like. The following week the votes were counted and the Sandringham College beanie was chosen. Those who would like to purchase a beanie, there is going to be a message on Compass regarding it. We’ve had a large amount of our school who have already put in the form that they would like one.  - Bluff Road Campus Vice Captain: Dorothy Paterson.