Principal's Message

What a positive start to the year it has been. Our Year 7 students have settled beautifully into the college, our Year 12s are working diligently towards their final year goals, and for all other students it is largely business as usual as learning gets fully underway.

Our Year 7 and Year 9 students are preparing for NAPLAN, which begins next week, while students across the college are completing SACs and CATs to demonstrate the learning growth they have experienced since the beginning of 2026.

In addition to this day-to-day work, we have also completed our externally led School Review. Please refer to my previous BSC Highlights article for further detail about this process.

We are now patiently awaiting the Review Report, which will inform the development of our next School Strategic Plan. However, throughout the review process the direction for our strategic work over the next four years became clear.

Our key areas of focus will be:

Consistent Classroom Practice to improve student learning, including:

• Inclusive teaching practices
• Curriculum development
• Assessment strategies
• The effective use of data

The use of an instructional model aligned with the Victorian Teaching and Learning Model 2.0

Renewing the college vision and values to strengthen student wellbeing, including:

• Improving learner agency
• Strengthening student connectedness and pride
• Embedding multi-tiered systems of support for all students

One of the most pleasing outcomes of the School Review is that these focus areas are not new to us. Much of our strategic work in 2024, and particularly throughout 2025, was dedicated to establishing the foundations needed for these priorities to become embedded across the college.

As a result, it already feels as though we have made meaningful progress – particularly in building teacher consistency and strengthening student connectedness and pride. The work ahead is both exciting and appropriate for where we are as a school.

As part of renewing our college vision and values, we will also consider elements of our school branding, including our school colours and logo.

However, it is important to emphasise that Brighton Secondary College is a school that serves its community. Any such consideration will not occur in a closed room with a marketing team. Instead, there will be opportunities for input from students, parents and staff.

With a community as large and engaged as ours, we know there will be hundreds – potentially thousands – of viewpoints. Every perspective raised will be valid and worthy of consideration, even when those perspectives may conflict with others.

Ultimately, any change to our logo or colours would need to be approved by School Council, particularly because of the potential impact on student uniforms. Any change would also need to be negotiated with our uniform provider and would almost certainly involve a staged transition from one logo or colour set to another.

I want to make this clear so that parents can be reassured that any uniform items they have recently purchased will not suddenly need to be replaced.

It is also entirely possible that, through consultation with our community, the preferred outcome will be to make no change to our logo or school colours. If that were the case, the consultation process would still be valuable because it would confirm that this decision reflects the views of our community.

Finally, while sharing this information may make it seem like the process is about to begin, we are not yet ready to start and do not currently have a timeline. I anticipate that the full process, once underway, would take between 12 and 24 months.

What we are ready for, however, is for our community to begin thinking about what a bright future for Brighton Secondary College might look like.