Principal's Message-
Laura Spence
Dear students and families,
I hope the term has started well for everyone. There has been no end of activities, camps, excursions, and exciting learning for our students. This week, we also have Year 10s back at Work Experience, a great follow-up to Course Counselling selections and preparation for starting their VCE and VM journey. In particular, Year 10s who have selected Vocational Major for 2024 will benefit from Work Experience this week as they will be completing one day a week of Structured Workplace Learning in their VM program.
The past two weeks at McClelland have had great lunchtime activities on offer. In addition to the regular clubs, the PE team has run an Olympic sport every day, which was well taken up by students.
In addition, we have had three different snow camps run and a broad range of activities from the Holocaust Museum, an Art Gallery visit, a range of interschool sports teams, a Scienceworks STEM visit, an Art for Literacy workshop, and many incursions. We also collaborated with Ballam Park Primary School, as both schools received a grant from Frankston Council for 500 trees. Our Parks and Gardens SBAT students worked with students next door, helping them to plant their trees, and then continued to plant McClelland’s trees.
There is plenty of learning going on in the classroom as well! Our classrooms are operating with great consistency and focus on teaching and learning time as we embed the school-wide classroom routines of Entry, Cue, to Start, and Exit. Next week, McClelland is hosting a Network meeting where around 60 leaders from local schools will visit for a presentation about our teaching and learning work and some classroom visits for observations. During this event, students will see small groups of leaders from other schools and a McClelland student leader in their classrooms for 5 to 10 minutes.
One of our dedicated Year 9 students, Jacynta Valentine, kindly showed me her work from the Year 9/10 elective, Product Design Technology, with Ms. Richardson, which I have photos of attached. Jacynta explained that she lives and breathes basketball, playing, coaching, and refereeing at Frankston, so she used basketball as her idea for her creation at school. I spent far too long playing the game, I was a bit disappointed with my goal form, but I had lots of fun trying! A great example of our Education by Design as students combine their passions with their learning.
Our recent Course Counselling was highly successful; thank you to parents and students who attended and invested time in thoughtful pathway choices. Students should regularly consider their attendance data, learning assessment results, and career goals as part of these decisions. Our timetabling team is now working on the subject selection data provided by students to determine what subjects we can run in 2025. After this, we will begin building the timetable and assess staffing needs. It’s an enormous undertaking and relies on students making informed choices with minimal changes after the set dates.
Finally, I’d like to mention the Department has sent out the 2024 Parent Survey for Schools. We would greatly appreciate parents taking the time to complete theirs. They are anonymous and provide us valuable feedback about how your child is succeeding at McClelland. The Department uses this school data to evaluate our work annually and every four years when School Reviews are conducted. The more responses we have, the more valuable the data. Traditionally, McClelland's parent survey response data is highly positive and has helped us identify what you value most about the College, allowing us to continue investing time and resources in those areas. Please see your email from ORIMA with your specific login details.
Let’s hope this sunny weather continues for the rest of Term 3. I look forward to an exciting second half of the term, especially as I accompany our Japanese students and staff visiting our sister school, Kariya Kita High School in Nagoya, Japan, starting Week 10 and into the holidays.