Principal's Report

2025 Planning

If your family is planning some new horizons and will be moving for the 2025 school year, early notification greatly helps our planning of 2025 staffing and class arrangements. Notifying the office of a move as soon as possible is greatly appreciated.

Further Reminder: Annual Parent & Caregiver Survey

All families are encouraged to participate in the annual Department of Education Parent & Carer Survey. Links and details of how to complete the survey were emailed on August 16, please contact the office if you did not receive this communication. The original survey invitation was sent out earlier this term to the parent or carer listed as 'Parent A' for each household in our system.

We sincerely thank all participants for your time in completing this survey, which generally takes around 10 minutes. Results are collected by the Department of Education and compared to schools across the state, our network and with schools with similar demographics to ours. As such, it forms a very useful metric that we use to monitor our strengths and areas of improvement.

The survey due date has been extended by the Department of Education to the end of Term 3.

School Council Highlights

Thank you to members of School Council for a productive meeting this past Wednesday evening. Prior to the official meeting, Steve Roche led a review of many of our policies that are due for review, particularly related to Child Safe considerations. Steve also outlined to members present our recent work within School-Wide Positive Behaviour Support (SWPBS) and how that links to behaviour management throughout the school.

During the School Council meeting, we discussed some budgetary items, including voluntary payments for 2025, costs for the upcoming 3/4 Camp, and ongoing discussions about how to smarten up our fencing along Haig and Foch Streets. We also reviewed the successful results of a comprehensive Financial Audit that occurred earlier this year.

School Council also decided to roll-over our uniform supply contract with Spartan for a further 3 year term.

Child Safe

As mentioned, many of our school policies (which can be seen on our school website) have important parts in them related to Child Safe. The Department of Education also has a publicly available Child Safe Policy, that can be easily found with a Google Search.

A key part of Child Safe is ensuring that volunteers who are working directly with children have Working With Children Check cards. We strongly encourage all parents and carers to register for a WWCC, which is a relatively easy online process.

Another aspect of Child Safe that has been discussed recently is the idea of photographs taken of students at school events. We would always recommend checking with an organiser or staff member before photographing any students other than your own child.

Thanks to all members of the community for helping to keep our students safe at school and in the community.

Fire Drill

Earlier this week we conducted a successful fire drill, our third emergency drill of the year. All students moved to the evacuation area calmly and quickly and were quickly accounted for. Thanks to Tim F for coordinating these drills throughout the year.

Peter Watson

Principal