PRINCIPAL'S REPORT

Dear Parents and members of the MESC Community

Our motto is about both high quality academic provision and the development of the skills and attitudes that young people need for success in life after school. It well describes the approach to all we do.

It is interesting that the recent Gonski Report 2.0 talks about the need for educators to personalise learning, in order to support and challenge all students at their point of need. In simple terms, this is about moving away from an approach that means that every student in a class has the same learning experience, simply based on the fact that they are all a particular age. As parents, we well know that our children do not develop at the same rate or time, and we certainly understand that there is nothing wrong when one sibling walks at nine months and another at fourteen months. We do not expect the second child to walk when they can’t, nor do we tell them they are underperforming, and yet this is the way most schools have worked since the early 1800s.

You can be well assured that Mount Eliza Secondary College is not still operating under this very old model, and that we have in fact been working on developing the Gonski recommendations for the last five years because the research has been out there pointing to this need. It is complex and challenging work for teachers, but it is the work that must be done.

Tamberhe report says school education must prepare students for a complex and rapidly changing world. As routine manual and administrative activities are increasingly automated, more jobs will require a higher level of skill, and more school leavers will need skills that are not easily replicated by machines, such as problem-solving, interactive and social skills, and critical and creative thinking.

MESC is ahead of the game as our introduction of IDEEA lab recognised these social changes, and allowed us to genuinely focus on developing the skills mentioned for our students. The same applies to our decision to implement the International Baccalaureate approach to teaching and learning for years 7-9, which has commenced this year in the Candidacy phase. This approach provides students with the structures to support the development of transferable skills which are the new measure of high capacity, and it does so in a global context because this is the way our young people will be working in future. You no longer need to go to India to have Indian work colleagues, and you can certainly work for a Chinese company whilst living in Melbourne.

We are excited to see the latest national report affirm all we do here at the college. We have more to learn and more to do, but there is no doubt that what we offer at Mount Eliza Secondary is ‘state of the art’.

Angela Pollard

Principal