Wellbeing & Engagement

Hello there, I'm Dimi Efthymiou, the newly appointed Student Wellbeing & Engagement Leader at PVNPS. With a diverse background in teaching across various roles and school environments, I've discovered my true passion lies in promoting student wellbeing. Joining PVNPS marks an exciting new chapter for me, as I'll be focusing on developing student wellbeing and empowering their voices and agency. These have always been areas close to my heart, and I'm excited to team up with both staff and students to create a culture where students feel empowered and supported in their overall wellbeing within our school community.

We've already started some exciting initiatives, like conducting the Attitudes to School Survey with our year 4-6 students and we're eagerly anticipating their feedback. I've been actively engaging with classrooms and meeting students, while also collaborating with external professionals to provide additional support. Our lunchtime clubs have been refreshed with new groups and recently, all student leaders joined Miss Ansons and me to forward plan upcoming events, fundraisers and other initiatives we're excited to tackle this year.

To give all students a voice we are trialling a new process in JSC. We will be using the Parking Lot tool to gather our thoughts and ideas and having class discussions on how we can be creative and solution focussed when addressing issues that arise.

The aim is to have a class meeting and allow your JSC reps to run as much of this as possible. For the younger reps, an older buddy has been assigned to support & help build their confidence in running meetings. During discussions, sticky notes outlining each point are placed in each of the sections. 

Issues & ideas that are considered should relate to the whole school, not individual classes, or year levels. These can be addressed in students’ own classes.

How the Parking Lot works:

Green – what are the positive things that are happening at PVNPS? What are we grateful for?

Yellow – What questions would we like answered about various things happening at PVNPS?

Red – What things would we like to improve at PVNPS?

Blue – What are some possible solutions to the things you want to improve?

On a fortnightly basis JSC reps will bring along their Parking Lots and we will:

• share and discuss the ideas/concerns raised.
• prioritise our collective focus as a team.
• present our collective ideas to the leadership for further discussion.

In the following meeting or during a lunchtime briefing, JSC will unpack leadership’s responses – this will be documented in a Bulletin, which we will email out to classes fortnightly. 

The JSC Reps' will:

• share the Bulletin with their class.
• complete any actions required, eg. assist in a class vote, ask for feedback, etc.
• complete a new parking lot for the following week.

The JSC Reps are very excited to represent their classes by giving all students a voice and to begin working on all the exciting things we have planned for the year. Student voice helps strengthen students’ connectedness to school.