Principal's News

It is hard to believe that we are just over a week away from November. Term 4 is busy but exciting and the last two weeks are no exception. We have enjoyed a great fortnight around the school. Thank you for taking a moment to take in our highlights over the last two weeks.

Around The School

Chill Out Space: Mrs Weston runs our Chill Out Space and Miho sensei put together an opportunity for students to design a logo for this space. Congratulations to Reina (5/6C) who designed this fantastic logo to promote this space for our students.

Teddy Bear Hospital: Our Prep and Year 1 students had a wonderful opportunity to work with Monash University Medical students, participating in our Teddy Bear Hospital incursion last week. Students were given the chance to learn around various aspects of medicine and treatments and help care for their very important teddy’s. I am happy to report that all teddy bears passed fitness tests and were able to return home having received a thorough medical evaluation.

Maths Club Games Day

Congratulations to our Year 5/6 High Ability maths team that represented our school on Wednesday in the SaGE Network problem solving day. 120 students represented 11 schools throughout the day with students using their problem solving and critical thinking skills to work through a series of very challenging games and problems. Thank you to Kato sensei and Onda sensei for supporting our students on the day.

School Council

On Tuesday evening, we held our first school council meeting of Term 4, this included discussion topics tabling our sub-committee reports on the evening including:

Finance: The school council adopted motions including the endorsement of the 2026 indicative cash budget and all accounts presented for the month of September. Additionally, the school council adopted the use of the ‘swimming in schools’ cash allocation to reduce costs overheads to all families for the upcoming whole school swimming program. A discussion item included the importance of 2026 volunteer payments in the school.
Education and Policy: The following policies were discussed and approved: Anaphylaxis Policy, Purchasing Card Policy, Student Dress Code Policy, Communication School Staff Policy. The sub-committee and school council members have also worked to align our existing policies with a Behaviour Guidelines approach to support our school community.
School Engagement: The sub-committee had the exciting opportunity to address possible dates for our 2026 school fete. We are in the process of confirming this date and will eagerly share with our school community once this is confirmed. We are just awaiting confirmation from our Japanese sister school to support their availability as we begin planning for our 2026 Japan Trip, we don’t wish for these dates to overlap so we will confirm our Japan Trip date and then lock in our school fete. Other topics raised included the support to families to transition to the Sentral parent app and the effective communication of overarching decisions. Whilst school council noted, that the primary aim of school council and sub-committees are to support governance. Ideas were canvassed around how the school can elicit further input from families.
Buildings and Grounds: The sub-committee were able detail a list of priority items in the school that need to be attended to, these maintenance and upgrade priorities range from smaller tasks able to be managed internally to larger more significant pieces of work. In addition to this, the sub-committee received an update on the initial steps put forward towards a playground upgrade for our junior playground with the work progressing to costing estimates. A working bee is scheduled for Friday 28th November, we would welcome the attendance from families to support this event.

Staff

A warm welcome to Felicia who has begun in the school over recent weeks, Felicia has joined our education support team working in the Year ½ area. Felicia is currently studying a Master of Teaching and is a great addition to our staff. Welcome Felicia!

School Values

Over the last few months, the school has consulted with our school community, our students and our staff as we look to refresh our school values and align this to our School Wide Positive Behaviour Support. This work is an important element to SWPBS implementation and allows the school to begin matching promoted behaviours and actions to three overarching values.

We thank and acknowledge the significant contribution our families have made in this work, our students and staff for their well considered input. These values will begin to be shared with students over the remainder of the year before beginning to be in use from the start of 2026.

Graphic Design

To support our new values, we are looking for a parent or family member that may wish to assist the school in conceptualising some new graphics for our three new values. We are hoping to use these logos to create a visual prompt and catchy graphic to support our students and use in our classrooms and around the school. Please let me know via email or drop into the office if this might be of interest.

World Teachers Day

Next Friday is a wonderful opportunity to celebrate the work of our teaching staff and acknowledge their efforts throughout our school. World Teachers’ Day is celebrated on the 31st October and I am full of admiration to our teaching staff that have incredible dedication to their work and the support and care for our students.

Celebrated educational psychologist Lee Shulman once wrote of teaching:

“Classroom teaching is perhaps the most complex, most challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced, and frightening activity that our species has ever invented. In fact, when I compared the complexity of teaching with that much more highly rewarded profession, ‘doing medicine,’ I concluded that the only time medicine even approaches the complexity of an average day of classroom teaching is in an emergency room during a natural disaster.”

Thank you to our wonderful teaching staff and my sincere appreciation to our Parents and Friends Club and school community who have generously supported our staff with a morning tea to celebrate their work next Wednesday morning – thank you!

Halloween

Our Junior School Council (JSC) have put together an exciting event for our students next Friday to celebrate Halloween with a special Halloween dress up day and Halloween disco hosted by our JSC teachers. Whilst this is an exciting day for our students, classroom teachers have and will remind students in the lead up to next week that costumes should still be appropriate and should not involve anything that is overly scary for students younger than them. This includes without exception, any pretend blood, pretend weapons or any bare feet. Students dressed inappropriately may be asked to change into school uniform.

SaGE Principal Network

On Thursday, the SaGE Principal Network continued our work with Educational Consultant Vic Zbar as we explored themes around school improvement, the challenges of change and instilling high expectations throughout the school. These are valuable opportunities for principals and assistant principals to network and work collaboratively with other local primary and secondary principals building alignment and shared understanding.

Assembly

A special Friday afternoon assembly will be held next week in lieu of a Monday morning assembly. Families are welcome to attend and further details will be shared in our schoolstream/sentral circular.

Happy Diwali

Many of our school community celebrate Diwali which was observed last Monday 20th October. We would like to extend a Happy Diwali to those who celebrated this special day! It was lovely to see Booran Reserve used to celebrate this special day and for families within the local community to come together and celebrate this day.

Active Schools - Go For Gold

This November we are getting active participating in the Glen Eira Active Schools program, with a chance to support our school and win a $100 Rebel Sport voucher. Further details will be shared over coming weeks, there is no need to do anything further at this stage aside from commit to some physical activity over the course of November and helping our school be crowned for Active Schools Champion for 2025.

Professional Learning

Over the last two weeks, our staff have continued to invest in significant professional learning. On Wednesday afternoon, we completed our annual CPR and asthma management training, staff complete this every 12 months and are assessed on our capacity to administer CPR, manage and use a defibrillator and support existing asthma management plans.

Further to that, our School Wide Positive Behaviour Support team continue to work with our Inclusion Outreach coach working towards a Key Improvement Strategy focusing on building capacity of our teachers and leaders in utilising the Multi-Tiered System Support data based problem solving process in term 4 2025 with a view to integrate the practice with fidelity throughout our school.

Changes to Digital Device Use

From 2027, the Victorian Government is introducing changes to the use of digital devices for students from Prep to Grade 6.

Under the new guidelines, schools:

will no longer invite families to purchase or bring their own digital devices to use at school for Prep to Grade 6
will follow new recommended digital device times, including minimal device time for Prep to Grade 2; and a maximum of 90 minutes per day for grades 3 to 6.

These changes are intended to support families by reducing cost-of-living pressures. They will also support students by reducing screen-time which can reduce the risk of eye strain, sedentary behaviour, and reduced peer interaction. These reforms complement Victoria’s nation-leading mobile phone restrictions, ensuring an integrated approach to addressing digital distraction and the inappropriate use of technology. Students with disability who use a digital device as a reasonable adjustment are exempt from these changes.

These changes are intended to support families with cost-of-living pressures and reduce student screen time. You can read more about the changes on the department’s website: Digital Learning: Policy.

At Caulfield Primary School, we already provide school-owned digital devices for student learning, so there is no impact on our school.

Thank you for a great fortnight around the school, I look forward to seeing everyone next week, enjoy a wonderful weekend.

Take Care,

Edward Strain

Principal