SCHOOL LEADERSHIP MESSAGE

 PRINCIPAL'S REPORT

2023 Reflections 

I would like to start by thanking all students, parents, and our amazing staff for their work in 2023. As I walk around the school each day I see amazing learning taking place, I see staff and students working together with positive connections, and I see fantastic facilities available for our school and community. 

I remember back to the start of 2023 as we opened our new Middle School Learning Hub for the first time, and we had to manage the inconvenience of construction still taking place around us. All staff and students showed tremendous resilienceduring this time and the completion of the building project was one of the real highlights of this year. With the STEAM building still only 5 years old, it’s fantastic for the students of our community to have the most modern facilities available to them.

Throughout the year the Department of Education asks all school staff, students, and parents to complete a survey on their experiences with their school. We would particularly like to thank all parents who completed this recently. The school has now received the results from this survey, and it has provided us with some excellent feedback. The recent parent survey showed that parents are very positive about our physical environment (91% of parents gave a positive answer to this), our high expectations of students (86%) and school communication (84%). It also gave us good feedback on areas for us to focus on. Teacher communication with parents was rated slightly lower by parents on the survey, and is something we’ve already started speaking about working on next year.

As a school we see the overall results of these surveys, and are shown how our result for each category compares to similar schools around the state, other local secondary schools, as well as all schools across the state. Across the three surveys, of the 306 comparisons between our results and other schools’ results, we equalled or exceeded the comparative measure on 254 occasions, or 83%. This is a tremendous result for our school and credit to the hard work of our parents, students and staff over many years. Our whole community should be very proud of the work they have done to create such a fantastic school and community for our students.

There have been many other highlights this year including camps and excursions, wonderful activities in classes, the expansion of our Activate program to now include Year 8 and sporting participation and success to name just a few. As I look forward to next year, I would particularly like to develop further opportunities to bring parents along on their child’s learning journey with us. There is so much wonderful learning, connections and behind the scenes work at our school every day, it would be great to help make parents and carers feel even more a part of their community’s school.

I have enjoyed every minute of my work this year, and I’m very much looking forward to the next few weeks as I head overseas with my family for a holiday. Rebecca Anthony will be Acting Principal during this time. I wish everyone a safe and happy Christmas and holiday period, and I look forward to seeing everyone again next year.