Principal's Message

Principal's Message

Hello wonderful people. I hope you are all okay and basically 'hanging in there'. I have found this stretch of time quite challenging. I pass no judgement on those unwilling to vaccinate, but I hope there is a pathway out of this complex mess quite soon. I have received my two doses of AstraZeneca and, luckily, have had no ill effects. For those of you choosing to vaccinate, I hope all is going well. I remain hopeful that the children will come back on site as soon as possible. Clearly, there is no school on site for the rest of Term 3 and the start of Term 4 is unknown at this stage.

I have made a conscious decision to not overload you with Compass Newsfeeds when unnecessary. Rather than send multiple updates with no new information, I have chosen to keep it minimal. I hope that is acceptable to families. My focus has been on the wellbeing of staff and students - both on-site and off-site.

I want to thank the 70 families who responded quickly to the feedback link regarding our performance during Remote Learning. You will find on the next page details of that feedback along with some changes we will be undertaking as a result of the trends we noted. Thank you for continuing to be invested in your school even during challenging times.

It would not be truthful for me to say that remote learning is perfect. It is not. However, we must continue to adapt and make the best of the situation for the sake of the children. I am deeply and truly sorry that you are all going through this.

I want to leave you with a quote:

"Our true genius is that we didn't give up."

NAPLAN Lands - Great Outcomes for SMPS

We received some exciting news earlier in the week. Our 2021 NAPLAN results came through to us electronically and they were outstanding. Our school vision is to inspire hearts and minds to thrive. Fundamentally, we want to be a school which produces good people, good citizens, and good learners. Wellness is at the base of our triangle and this is required for solid literacy and numeracy to be achieved. NAPLAN measures the academic side of our efforts in a snapshot.

How wonderful to think that the NAPLAN outcomes for South Melbourne Primary School are the highest of any school in my 33 year career. This is a credit to our children, our families, our staff, and our programs. If anyone of these areas was faulty, the NAPLAN outcomes would suffer accordingly. They did not.

I want to convey how incredibly proud I am of our school community. Of course, there are many other facets of our work that make a school successful. However, healthy NAPLAN data is a key performance indicator of the effectiveness of any school.

There are many reasons why it is a good idea to have your child enrolled at South Melbourne Primary School. This is one of them.

We will be sharing some of the highlights of our NAPLAN data in next week's newsletter. We want to respect our Grade 3 and Grade 5 families and children by giving information to them first before sharing with the wider community. 

I Wonder...

We had about 50% of our parents in Grades 3 and 5 solving some NAPLAN questions together prior to the testing period. I wonder if we could have achieved even higher outcomes if we had 100% of our parents working side-by-side together? Something to think about in 2022…

One More Thing....

A lot of work goes into the production of this newsletter. There are some wonderful resources and reminders in the Class Updates and Class Celebration pages. Please take the time to look through these materials and click on the links that are relevant to your child's grade level. We create this newsletter to celebrate our wonderful students and to help families support them. Please take the time to read and digest the material.

There will be another newsletter next week to finish off the term and a newsletter sent out on the Saturday prior to the commencement of Term 4 to help set you up for success.