The Score

College Principal's Report           

School Review

 

The Department of Education and Training’s (DET) new school review process requires all schools to form a review panel to spend three days on site analysing the schools performance against goals and targets from their strategic plan. Our College is one of the first schools undertaking a review under this new process.  In formulating our panel, we were are able to select  two expert challenge partners to join Mr Barry Soraghan our appointed reviewer, Mr Justin Butler Knox Senior Education improvement Leader, Ms Cindy Lopes College Council President, Mr Chris Knight Assistant Principal and myself.

 

I was pleased to be able invite two such highly respected education experts to be our challenge partners, both who provided the rigour wanted for our review:

  • Lawrie Drysdale Associate Professor in Educational Leadership, Melbourne Graduate School of Education
  • Martin Culkin a former principal and leadership expert who was awarded the Order of Australia Medal in 2013 for his contribution to education in Victoria

During the day the panel visited classrooms and the reviewer and one of the challenge partners conducted a focus group with students from each of the year levels to ascertain the level of student voice provided at Scoresby Secondary College

By the end of the day the panel validated our self –evaluation as an accurate reflection and assessment of what the college had achieved between 2015 and 2018.

 

NAPLAN

Last week our students in Years 7 and 9 participated in the annual NAPLAN tests in reading, writing, language conventions (spelling, grammar and punctuation) and numeracy. Recently there has been much controversy over the NAPLAN tests in the media. It is important to understand that NAPLAN tests are just one aspect of a school’s assessment and reporting process; they do not replace ongoing assessments made by teachers about student performance.   I would like to thank students for the positive manner in which they participated in the tests, supervising teachers and Ms Michelle Deboer for her work in preparing for the three days.

 

Student Journalist

Erwin Diesta  of Year 11 has been invited to become a student journalist for Studfield Community Newspaper. Members of our community who receive this community paper can read Erwin’s first article in the edition to be published next week.

 

Your Employment Circumstances 

Please tell us if your employment circumstances have changed - have you moved to a new job, or are you newly unemployed?  Funding from the state government varies and is partially dependent on your employment circumstances, so it is good to get it right.  We also need to know your level of education - the less education parents have the more Equity Funding we receive to provide additional support for students across the board.  Please contact the General Office if you feel you should give us some more information or if you have moved house and have not told us your new address or changed your telephone numbers.

 

Curriculum Day

I would like to acknowledge the work carried out by our new Head of Teaching and Learning Mr Murray Cronin in preparing for our curriculum day two weeks ago.  On the day, we launched our new staff instructional handbook developed to support the significant work of all staff at Scoresby Secondary College. The handbook is a practical resource to support the full implementation of the College Instructional Model that brings together what we teach and how we teach it. 

Throughout the first part of the day, staff worked on further developing their shared language for describing our educational practice when planning, monitoring and reflecting on classroom practice and when engaging in conversations about improving professional practice.

 

This was followed by a focus on one of the key elements of our model:  Personalising Learning and Differentiation. Personalising learning ensures our teachers know each students background, learning needs, strengths, interests and aspirations to provide learning experiences and choices that help students to progress in their learning. Differentiation takes personalising to the next level, enabling teachers to extend the knowledge and skills of every student in every class. The objective in differentiation is to lift the performance of all students, including those who are falling behind and those ahead of year level expectations. Differentiated teaching provides appropriate challenge for all students in class. It does so by responding to student differences in readiness, interest and learning profile.

 

The instructional handbook is very impressive and we have already had feedback on the quality from experts from Melbourne and Monash Universities. Teachers at Scoresby Secondary College are becoming recognised as leaders in education and the evidence is showing in what is happening in the classroom. This was particularly evident on the school review validation day when the reviewer raised the College’s assessment level against the Departments Continua of Practice to a higher rating for our curriculum planning and assessment and building practice excellence.

 

There is a copy of the Instructional Handbook on display in the General Office.

 

Gail Major

Principal