School Council

School Council Update

It’s been a while since I have given an update from School Council, so sorry about that! To make up, I’ll now give you an update on our last two meetings!

In September, we had our open School Council meeting where an open invitation was extended to anyone from our school community to attend. We were grateful to welcome one person to our meeting, and we really appreciate the interest from this person in attending. Next time, we’d love to see many more! At this meeting we also welcomed our local Member for Ripon, Martha Haylett, who gave up her evening to join us at our meeting to discuss issues from our perspective relating to not only our school, but the Miners Rest community. One of the things we discussed included the potential dangers due to the high amount of traffic (at speed) on Howe Street and the impact that has to our children who walk and ride to school and the possibility of additional safe crossings. We also discussed the overcrowded and lacking bus services from Miners Rest (and surrounds) to Ballarat and the various Secondary schools that our older children in our community use to get to school each day and also the potential for additional access to the school via Clark Street. All of these points were well received by Martha and she is very committed to taking our concerns to the relevant body’s for progression and exploration. We feel very confident that Martha will be a strong advocate for what’s best for our school and community.

Our November meeting was held last Wednesday evening. We discussed many things, some of which included some updates to school and kindergarten policies, our 2024 camp dates and the results from the Staff Opinion Survey, Students Attitudes to School Survey and NAPLAN results. It was very pleasing to see overall very positive results, with many areas in each report exceeding the State average.

Our final School Council meeting for 2023 will be on December 4th where we look forward to celebrating the culmination of another very successful, meaningful, and productive year of School Council. I know I speak for all members when I say we all value the contribution we can make on School Council and enjoy being a part of improvements and progression for our great school.

It’s a bit early, but I encourage anyone who may be interested in joining School Council in 2024 to seriously consider this. We meet just eight times per year on a Monday evening and we very much value the contribution of our parent members. There will be an official call for nominations to join in early 2024, but in the meantime if anyone has any questions, please reach out to me (larna.woodyatt@education.vic.gov.au) at any time.

Thanks!

Larna Woodyatt

School Council President