Message from our 

Campus Principal

What a fantastic start to the year!

Morwell Campus continues to grow this year with more students enrolled than we have had in the last 15 years.   This means more opportunities for students so we’re excited to see it happen.  It has been amazing to see all the new students settle in, particularly the 2025 Year 7 cohort.  To help bring them the best possible educational opportunities possible, we have been pleased to welcome Elisse Burke and Paul Mackie to our team at Kurnai.  At the same time, Sam Connell and Olivia Mitchell, who have worked with us for a while as tutors, have now entered the classroom as teachers too.  Their enthusiasm brings so much to the experience of your kids.

We look forward to many opportunities throughout the year with camp planning underway for all year levels and our first excursions going out to the Morwell Tech School to bring a new experience to our Year 7 students.  What great opportunities!

With all these new students arriving, we’re also seeing the most focussed cohort ever.  I hope that you have been inundated with KPAs (Kurnai Positive Acknowledgements).  These are our way of providing a simple reward to students for their great efforts.  We praise them in the classroom, and we’d really like for you to follow it up at home.  Your kids feel great to know that we are proud of them, but it means so much more to them to hear that their parents and carers are too.  Start a KPA challenge in your friend group or workplace and see which parent gets the most.  Bring your child on board as part of the challenge and reward them for their positive input.  

We are also working hard on sending home postcards to reward consistent positive behaviours.  If your child is selected to receive one, make a big deal out of it.  This is a great recognition that teachers cannot give to everyone.  This means that your child is consistently demonstrating high levels of the expectations we have. 

Resilience & Relationships 

Our new program at Year 7, 8 and 9 sees us partner with the Resilience Project to deliver a strong pastoral care curriculum to our Year 7-9 students.  Focussed on gratitude, mindfulness and empathy, these are the skills that will help build your child into a strong, centred and caring young adult, prepared to contribute their part to society and look after their own and others’ wellbeing.  We’re also continuing our Live4Life training this year with all Year 8 students being trained in Youth Mental Health First Aid to help them understand what to do when they or others are in need and how to seek help.

If you have any questions about these programs or their content, please contact your child’s Team Leader or Daniel Murphy to discuss them further.

NAPLAN

NAPLAN is not far off now and we’re starting to set up for it. Kurnai College encourages all students to participate in NAPLAN and just do their best.  It is not for us to judge the child’s individual abilities, though it does assist us to understand some individuals needs to be able to support them.  Generally speaking, we use NAPLAN results to help us identify where we need to strengthen our teaching programs or review skills.  This is done by looking at cohort averages and trends over time, rather than a narrow focus on individuals.

Learning Behaviour Updates

We are not far off completing the first round of Learning Behaviour Updates.  These will be released on Compass, so if you don’t have access to the app, please contact our office for assistance.  The Learning Behaviour Updates provide an understanding of how hard your child is working to do better.  We believe this is a great indicator of long term success and focus on it more than being the ‘top of the class’.  Any child can achieve excellent scores on the Learning Behaviour Updates.  The students are measured between Unsatisfactory and Excellent on a number behaviours, translating to a score between 0 and 4.  We recognise and reward all scores between 3.5 and 4.0.  We expect all students will be above 3.0.  This roughly translates to your child “usually” demonstrating the behaviours required.

Student Leaders

We have been inundated with interest in our student leadership positions and will be interviewing students over the next week to determine the positions.  These are an important position of responsibility and it’s great that so many students want to rise to the challenge.  Unfortunately, not all students will be able to be considered this year, so if your child receives a letter indicating that they have missed out, support them to continue to demonstrate their enthusiasm and apply again in the next year.

Mr Dan Swallow

Morwell Campus Principal