Principal Address

Dear Parents,

I pray you had a blessed week.

Congratulations to our Zone swimmers on their excellent efforts and results at the recent South Met Swimming Carnival. We are super proud of all of you.

This week our Year 6 class welcomed the Member for Fairfield, Mr David Saliba. I'm told students were highly engaged and respectful during the visit. What great ambassadors for our school, our Year 6 students are.

I have received a few emails concerned about overtaking in the Kiss/Drop area, a reminder to be please be patient and not overtake as it is a safety risk. Thanks for your patience with this, our staff are doing a great job ensuring speed limits are adhered to and everyone is kept safe at our Kiss and Drop and we appreciate your assistance.

Finding the Wow in everyday

Schools should be places of energy.  I want our school to be a place of energy, learning and engagement. We often talk about “wow moments” as a staff, lightbulb moments, moments of hands-on learning, collaboration and real life links to learning. Wow moments should not be rare events reserved for performances, excursions or special assemblies. 

As a school community, I want these every day. A wow moment might be a student finally understanding a new concept after persistence and practice. It might be a thoughtful question that shifts the direction of a lesson. It might be the confidence of a child who realises, “I can do this.” Sometimes it is loud and visible. Other times it is quiet and deeply personal. 

At the same time, schools are not simply places of entertainment. Learning requires structure, clarity and explicit teaching. Knowledge is built carefully and deliberately. Skills are practised. Teachers guide, model and scaffold so that students develop strong foundations. The balance between joy and rigour is where excellence lives. Fun without purpose can be fleeting. Structures without excitement can feel flat. But when purposeful teaching is combined with curiosity, when deep learning is paired with engagement, something powerful happens. Students are not just busy, they are learning. They are not just entertained, they are growing.

I’ve seen a few examples of this over the past few weeks: a Kindy lesson on habitats, a Year 6 lesson on democracy where they participated in a real life election and a Year 3 Music lesson on beat and rhythm. Importantly, wow moments are different for every child. For one student, it may be mastering a reading strategy. For another, it may be contributing to a group discussion. For another, it may be solving a complex problem independently. For a class, it might be one of Mrs Burgess’ Science lessons. 

As a school community, our goal is not to chase spectacle. It is to create classrooms where excitement and quality teaching sit side by side. Where students experience both the thrill of discovery and the satisfaction of mastery. Where learning is joyful, but also disciplined and deep. It’s not always something that we get perfect, but something as a staff we are continually doing professional development in and aiming for. Our staff have also been using this in their vocabulary with the students lately. 

As parents, maybe this is a good thing for us to do. Instead of asking “how was your day?” to our students, we can ask our students, “what was a wow moment today?” and perhaps we might get richer answers and an insight into the moments of their learning that are impactful and exciting to them. 

My door is always open. 

Mr Joe Britton

Principal