Patrick Halpin

Wellbeing and Community Engagement

Snapshot Surveys

Our survey on Communication @ Kingswood received the highest number of responses so far this year – 72! This shows us that it is a topic of interest for the community.

We had a mixed response regarding the general rating of communication in Kingswood Primary School, as illustrated in the graph:

Scale: 0 Terrible - 5 Flawless

Almost 50% of respondents believe there has been an improvement in communication this year, 47% believe it has remained the same and the remainder reported a deterioration.

Some people commented that they would prefer to have notices sent home in hard copy in the students’ schoolbags. Unfortunately, this is not an option for our school for a range of reasons. Firstly, we are working towards becoming an environmentally sustainable school and to send home our notices in hard copy would be detrimental to that process. In addition, the amount of time required to print and distribute those notices is prohibitive. Parents of students who have transitioned to High School have reported that if they hadn’t been exposed to Compass while their students attended Kingswood Primary School, they would have struggled to keep up to date on communication. I urge all of our families to persist with electronic forms of communication and strive for accuracy by checking Compass at least three times per week and turning on push notifications so you don’t miss any important messages.

One respondent requested more frequent updates on what is happening in classrooms. This is something the school is working on as we begin to move towards continuous reporting. Every family should receive at least two pieces of work in Term 3 as part of our trial. Please give feedback to your child’s teacher or to Mr Cox regarding your experience. Parents are advised to check their children’s work on Compass via a browser rather than using the mobile app.

Other comments and suggestions included:

Bring back the termly newsletters from teachers
Improvements to compass: ability to save items for later, improved app (so you don’t have to open certain things in the browser), news feed should be presented in chronological order, year level colour coding, calendar events linked to the notification, ability to hide notices once you’ve read them.
Sometimes notifications do not provide enough notice (e.g. end of term performance at assembly).
Thank you to the school improvement team and the teaching staff for keeping me informed about my child and the general school environment.
The office staff are also so friendly and helpful when I have questions.
I think the addition of parent alerts that your child will be receiving an award at assembly is a great idea.

As a final note, I would like to remind parents of the function of the communication you receive from Kingswood Primary School. Research shows that school accounts for only 20-40 percent of relative influence on student achievement while home accounts for 60-80 percent (Australian Research Alliance, 2012). While we understand that parents and families are busy, we are attempting to promote communication between home and school so that the importance of education is modelled at home and at school. A study carried out on behalf of the Commissioner for Children and Young People, WA (2015) reported that

“Supportive home learning involvement (e.g. talking about school and structuring the home environment to support learning) showed clear positive effects on child math and reading achievement. Inhibited involvement (e.g. time constraints and competing responsibilities) were negatively associated with achievement.”

This week’s survey is on the presentation by Dr. John Bench that took place in our school last week. I will also send it to all attendees by email.

If you are interested in completing past questionnaires, please follow these links:

If there is a burning topic you would like to see a survey on, you can let me know by emailing

halpin.patrick.p@edumail.vic.gov.au

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