SCHOOL LEADERSHIP MESSAGE

 PRINCIPAL'S REPORT

Welcome back to Term Three. I hope that everyone had a fantastic break over the recent holidays and are looking forward to a big term ahead.

We started this term by recognising NAIDOC week. NAIDOC week is recognised across Australia in the second week of July each year. As we are typically on school holidays at this time, we take the time to recognise this significant event at the start of Term Three each year. We started with a whole school assembly where we were fortunate to have local elder, and parent, Jarrod West offer a Welcome to Country and Smoking Ceremony for all students and staff to participate in. Our Marrung Lead, Ms Izzy Kennedy, then gave our community the background of NAIDOC and why it’s important for all of us to continue this work today. Further events later in the week also helped students and staff to understand the significance of NAIDOC.

In the first two weeks of this term, we have received some student learning data from both NAPLAN and ACER testing. I wrote to the school community yesterday celebrating the incredible results we received from this. In many areas our students are now consistently outperforming ‘similar schools’ and ‘all schools’ in both performance and learning growth. These results are a wonderful credit to our dedicated and committed staff and the effort that all students have put into their learning over recent years. We should all be very proud of our community's secondary college.

As our school continues to grow, we welcomed Mr Michael Knowles to our teaching staff at the start of this term. Michael starts with us after spending time with us as a pre-service teacher in Term Two this year and will be taking a range of Maths and Science classes. Welcome Michael!

Five of our Year 9 and 10 students left for an amazing experience at the start of this week. Jess Churchill, Wil Reynolds, Noah Rodriquez and Nathalia Althorp all started their nine-week program at the School for Student Leadership this week. This is a wonderful opportunity for these students to live and learn in a new and challenging environment for a term, and build a range of leadership skills and other capabilities. We look forward to hearing of their experiences when they return. Also, Phoebe Ye was accepted into the John Monash Science School Regional Exchange program. Her three-week program also started this week. Phoebe will have the opportunity to live with a host family in Melbourne and attend classes and programs at this elite Maths/Science facility for the next three weeks. This will be another wonderful experience for Phoebe and congratulate her on her acceptance into this highly competitive program.