Principal's Post
From Mr Phillips
The State-wide headlines for this year’s NAPLAN have been:
Our secondary schools are performing strongly and continuing to improve, with Victoria’s Year 7 students the first or second best performing in four out of five testing areas; reading, numeracy, writing, and spelling. Compared with last year, Year 9 students saw their mean score increase in four out of five of the testing areas: reading, numeracy, spelling and grammar, and punctuation.
At Ringwood Secondary College, I can report that our results in 2018 have exceeded expectations and reflects the alignment of key improvement strategies and actions in our Strategic and Annual Implementation Plans. Particular interest centres on student learning growth and our results for Years 7-9 in Writing, Reading and Numeracy highlight the strong performance of our students, when compared with similar schools, our network and the state.
NAPLAN provides us with a snapshot into what is happening for our students and needs to be used with other data to make judgements about how we are tracking. It is fair to say though that these are our best results for a number of years and in Year 9 some of our best ever results. The achievements against targets in our Annual Implementation Plan further highlight significant levels of learning growth for our students.
NAPLAN READING 2018
Target: 25% in top 2 bands at Year 9. Actual result: 25%
Target: 13% or less in bottom 2 bands at Year 9. Actual result: 7%
Target: 76% high or medium relative growth from Year 7 to 9. Actual result: 82.48%
NAPLAN NUMERACY 2018
Target: 21% in top 2 bands at Year 9. Actual result: 37%
Target: 11% or less in bottom 2 bands at Year 9. Actual result: 6%
Target: 70% high or medium relative growth from Year 7 to 9. Actual result: 78.54%
Thank you and congratulations to all ensembles who have performed throughout this term at the Victorian Schools Musical Festival and Royal South Street in Ballarat. All performed to their best and were great ambassadors for the college at such prestigious events.
The results achieved at Ballarat have been outstanding:
RSC Symphony Orchestra: 3rd place – just behind Wesley College (2nd place) and Caulfield Grammar, Wheelers Hill Campus (1st place); RSC Training Strings 2nd place
Junior Choir: Silver medallion and Adjudicator’s Encouragement Award; Symphonic Band Honourable Mention; Senior Stage Band Highly Commended; Intermediate Stage Band 3rd place; Junior Stage Band Honourable Mention.
There will be a further opportunity to hear some of these great performances at our upcoming
Gala Concert next Thursday 20th September, 7.30pm at the George Woods Performing Arts Centre, Yarra Valley Grammar School, Kalinda Rd, Ringwood. Tickets are only be available via TryBooking via the following link: https://www.trybooking.com/book/event?eid=414424
We are grateful for the support received from Bendigo Bank Ringwood and their foundation for supporting our Work Futures Expo to be held in 2019 and student leadership initiatives. Recently, three students presented at the Magic Moments Leadership summit to spoke about their experience to Bendigo Bank who sponsored their involvement. They worked with Shane from Boronia K-12, as well as students from across the country.
Two teams of our Year 7 and 8 students competed in the Tournament of the Minds competition on Saturday August 24. Both teams put in a huge effort and came away with Honours in the STEM and Arts categories.
The Youth in Philanthropy group recently had their graduation ceremony at the Melbourne Town Hall. Through their research and site visits, their recommendations were to donate $7000 to Cultivating Communities who run after school cooking programs for students, $2000 to Guide Dogs for the purchase of equipment and $1000 to Kids Own Publishing to work with students to write and publish their own books.
Chookas to all our performers in this year’s Victorian State Schools Spectacular event “To the Beat”, that is being staged at Melbourne Arena on Saturday September 15. We have broad representation in all elements of performance – lead singers, musicians, featured soloists, choir and dance.
Students from our Art club are continuing work with our guest artist Kathy Heyward on some murals depicting the principles of Bounce and promoting positive mental health.
The upcoming term break is a very important one for students completing final VCE exams in Unit 4 and a focussed revision program with structured and regular exam practice are important elements in successful ly preparing for final assessments.
Term 4 classes resume on Monday October 8th.
Michael Phillips
Principal