Principal's Report

Looking back over the term, it is clear that it has been a busy one, with much achieved both at a whole-school level and by individual students and staff.

Perhaps there was no better way to celebrate the end of the term than with our College Colour Run. With perfect weather, plenty of colour and a great sense of fun, it was wonderful to see students and staff coming together and enjoying themselves. Events such as this are an important part of school life and provide an opportunity to celebrate the sense of connection and community that exists across our College. My thanks go to everyone involved in organising the event, as well as to the students and staff who embraced the day and made it such a positive way to finish the term.

With the weather getting warmer and the days growing longer, summer suddenly doesn’t seem too far away, and with it comes the end of 2026.

For our Year 12 cohort, that means making their final preparations for the end of their secondary schooling. Students are finalising their studies and ensuring they have completed the requirements needed to achieve their VCE, whether through the academic program or the Vocational Major.

For some, these final weeks mean preparing for exams, completing practice exams, studying and revising. For others, they mean increasing work commitments and stepping into more formal arrangements such as apprenticeships and traineeships. For all of our Year 12 students, however, there is an increasing focus on what comes next. It is an exciting time, but understandably also a nervous one, as they prepare to step beyond school and begin making their own way in the world.

In many ways, the College is doing something similar as we look towards 2027 and beyond.

Planning for next year is now well underway. We are working through class allocations and student subject selections and beginning the jumbo, mega-sudoku puzzle of allocating staff to classes to ensure that student achievement and growth are maximised across all subject areas. The budget constraints facing schools are tightening, just as they are for many households and organisations, and this adds another layer of complexity to the task of planning for next year.

Maximising student outcomes, though, is about much more than simply making sure everything “fits” into a timetable or a budget.

As a school, we are constantly looking at how we can improve and how we can continue to work towards the goals articulated in our School Strategic Plan, developed following our school review earlier this year. As part of this improvement work, the College will be restructuring its leadership profile for 2027. I am very pleased to congratulate Mr Geoff Matheson, who will be stepping into an Acting Assistant Principal position for 2027. This restructure will also create a couple of new opportunities within the College leadership team, and I look forward to sharing more about these in due course.

An important part of any improvement process is ensuring that our decisions are informed by good data, and that information comes from many different sources.

Some comes from key measures such as NAPLAN and VCE achievement. Equally important, however, is the information we receive from the people most affected by the decisions we make as a school: our students and our parent community.

This information takes many forms. It includes the surveys you complete for us, attendance and other measures of student engagement, student responses to expressions of interest for enrichment activities, and feedback about the programs and activities we run at the College.

As many of you will know, our Agentic Learning Framework includes reflection as one of its key elements. The capacity to stop, reflect on our performance, identify what is working and consider our next steps is crucial to developing agency, whether we are a student in a Maths class, a teacher reflecting on their practice, or the principal of a school.

The feedback we receive from our community helps our leadership teams do exactly this. We use it to identify areas for improvement and to establish strategies and programs to address them.

With this in mind, I would particularly like to thank all of the parents and carers who took the time to complete the Parent Opinion Survey this term. We had our largest response during my time at the College, with more than 80 parents contributing their views.

I am also very pleased to report that the preliminary data is encouraging. At this stage, it appears that we have improved across all measures compared with last year and previous years, and that we are performing above comparable network schools on many key measures. On a number of measures, we are also above or approaching state-level results.

While this is a positive reflection of the work being undertaken across the College, improvement means continuing to look carefully at where we can do better. There are still areas that have not improved to the degree we would like, and these will help inform our priorities over the coming months and into 2027.

As Term 3 comes to a close, I would like to wish all of our students, staff and families a safe and enjoyable break. For our Year 12 students, the holidays will look a little different, with practice exams and continued preparation for the important weeks ahead. I encourage them to use this time productively, but also to make space to rest, recharge and spend time with family and friends.

The same applies to all of us. Term 4 always seems to arrive at speed, bringing with it celebrations, transitions and preparations for another year. I hope everyone has the opportunity over the break to slow down for a little while, enjoy the warmer weather and return refreshed for what promises to be another busy and rewarding final term of 2026.

Kerryn Sandford

Principal