Galilee Newsletter

Leadership and Management

Respectful Relationships

All Victorian schools are required to meet the seven Child Safe Standards, to ensure that they are well prepared to protect children from abuse, family violence and neglect.  Requirements for these standards are set out in Ministerial Order 870 and compliance is monitored by the VRQA.

Under Child Safe Standard 7 (Strategies to Promote Child Empowerment and Participation) schools are required to deliver appropriate education about:

  • Element 1: Standards of behaviour for students attending our school
  • Element 2: Healthy and respectful relationships (including sexuality)
  • Element 3: Resilience
  • Element 4:  Child abuse awareness and prevention

All schools delivering the Victorian Curriculum (Personal and Social Capability) are now required to deliver Respectful Relationshipseducation to meet the requirements set out in Elements 2 and 3.  

Respectful Relationships is a wide ranging initiative to help young Victorians deal with a range of challenges they may face and covers topics including being respectful, resilient and engaged at school and confident in themselves.

Respectful Relationships promotes equality and helps boys as well as girls learn how to build healthy relationships.  The initiative prepares them to face challenges by developing problem-solving skills and building empathy, resilience and confidence.

Family violence has a devastating impact on our community and affects people from all walks of life. The Royal Commission into Family Violence recommended Respectful Relationships be introduced in all government and Catholic schools to change attitudes and prevent the prevalence of family violence in future generations.

 

This year, more than 120 Victorian Schools are receiving funding and intensive professional development training to become Respectful Relationships Leading Schools and over 900 schools are being mentored by the Leading schools to become Respectful Relationships Partner schools.  

 

Galilee has become a partner school with Leading school, Firbank Grammar in Brighton, in the Respectful Relationships Initiative.  As a partner school we have been granted government funding to begin implementing a whole-school approach to Respectful Relationships.   Our school-based team consists of Julianne Price, Holly Evans and Danielle Gerecke.  As a team we will be:

  • Conducting initial all staff briefings
  • Examining if our school’s policies and activities treat everyone equally
  • Developing and implementing an action plan
  • Participating in related professional learning.

Taking a whole-school approach is about embedding a culture of respect and equality across the entire school community, from classrooms to staffrooms, sporting fields, fetes and social events. This approach leads to positive impacts on students’ academic outcomes, their mental health, classroom behaviour and relationships between teachers and students.

 

For more information about Respectful Relationships, click on the video below.

Speak With Power

Next term, our Year 5 students will be participating in "Speak With Power".  The course is facilitated by highly trained public speaker, Ron Thomas (Director of Speak With Power).

This course aims to prepare our students in the area of public speaking in preparation for leadership opportunities next year and in the future.  The program consists of 6x100 minute lessons that will take place in October and November.

 

Students will be taught how to structure a speech for maximum impact, how to generate ideas, introductions, conclusions and sign posting. They will have practice at delivering impromptu speeches, giving feedback and suggesting improvement in others and be given strategies to use when dealing with stress linked to public speaking.

 

We look forward to welcoming Ron to Galilee and we are very excited to be providing this opportunity and experience to our Year 5 students.

University Placements

We welcome Hershey De Ocampo from Australian Catholic University (ACU) to Galilee.  Hershey is currently completing a Certificate 4 in Education Support and is required to complete 47 hours of experience in a school.  She will be working at Galilee every Monday until the end of November in Prep, Year 3 and Year 6.