Acting Principal's Message

Dear Families, Welcome to Term 4!  I hope you all enjoyed some quality family time together, whether you managed to get away on a family trip or stayed at home to enjoy all the wonderful things that Melbourne has to offer. 

This term will no doubt be an enjoyable and productive one, with a great many events to look forward to e.g. camps, new foundation 2023 transition sessions, soccer gala day, whole school disco, excursions, incursions, orientation to 2023 classes, community coffee cart etc

We have a great start to the term. The students have come back enthusiastic, energised, and ready to learn. Staff are excited about the term with many engaging whole school and individual year level events planned. 

Early on Monday morning we wished the Year 6 students, Mrs D, Ms De Angelis, Ms Pallas, Ms Beaton, Mr Chapman and a reservice teacher, Karen an enjoyable bus trip to Canberra. The action-packed camp will see the group visit a wide variety of venues in Canberra including Parliament House, the Mint, the Australian Institute of Sport and many more educational places. We look forward to welcoming them back on Friday afternoon.

Over the term break there was a number of improvements to the school grounds -

• new asphalt on the south side of the school near the Stonnington council playgrounds,
• some maintenance to the red brick works near the same playgrounds, and 
• gardening around all areas of the school

NEW ENROLMENTS

If you have a child commencing prep in 2023 or know of someone who hasn’t yet enrolled their child, please do so as soon as possible. 

We are fortunate to have a lot of interest in our school, but we need to ensure that we are reserving enough places for our current families.

NEW VICTORIAN GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS AGREEMENT 

A new industrial agreement is now in place for all staff of Victorian Government Schools. There are two main differences between our past agreement and the current one:

1. Professional Practice Days – during 2022, there was a total of 3 ‘pupil free’ days for teachers to undertake professional learning/training to improve their practice. In 2023, there will be two professional practice days (one day in each semester) and one day for 2024 and 2025. These professional practice days are in addition to the four curriculum days per year. 

The work undertaken by teachers on professional practice days must be consistent with Departmental and school priorities and selected from the following areas:

• planning
• preparation
• assessment of student learning
• collaboration
• curriculum development
• relevant professional development
• peer observation including feedback and reflection

The difference between a ‘professional practice day’ (PPD)  and a ‘curriculum day (both being pupil free) is that the PPD agenda is driven by the teachers as they identify specific areas to refine their practice, whereas the Curriculum Day agenda is derived from the school’s Annual Implementation Plan to address areas as identified from student achievement data. 

The following pupil free days for the remainder of 2022:

• Monday 14 November – professional practice day. 

2. Time in Lieu- We all know that teachers work many hours over and above their scheduled working week, but, over time, we have held an increasing number of school events after hours for the convenience of our working parents. For example, parent information nights, parent-teacher interviews, school productions, student- led conferences etc. With the new Agreement, schools now have two options when planning extra-curricular events: they either re-arrange the events to occur within the teachers’ working hours (between 8:45 and 4:45pm) or the teacher must be given ‘time in lieu’. 

At TPS, our preference, so that time is not taken away from teachers being in their class (time in lieu means a casual relief teacher would be taking the class instead) so we are looking at how we might reorganize school events to minimize the requirement for time in lieu. For example, our staff will all be attending the school production, if required or an Art Show; however, our consultative committee will be reviewing how time is compensated in ways that minimize any impacts to our students. 

 We are all endeavouring to maintain a better work-life balance, so for our teachers, this agreement is timely. 

Please review our dates further in the newsletter so that we see you at key events. 

Yes, it’s certainly going to be an action packed and fun-filled term.

Kind regards,

Sharon Wildermuth

Acting Principal