Principal's Report

Maintenance Funding

It was great to be able to have Jackson Taylor MP, our State Parliamentarian, at a special assembly yesterday to announce some very welcome additional funding to our school. A total investment of $142,238 has been made to Marlborough, with $100,000 of this being provided to us to upgrade our toilet facilities. 

This has been ongoing work between myself, Paul Mountney (our school council president) and Jackson to secure this funding and I was very pleased to have Jackson here yesterday to announce that we are able to get to work in updating these facilities. 

As I wrote in my letter yesterday, this will have a minor impact on the timeline of our playground renewal in that this is another large scale project our school is undertaking.  A report to the community around the master plan of our playground renewal will be coming home to families soon, which will outline our timeline for this work once adjustments have been made for the toilet upgrade. 

Hats

All students should have their hats at school as we have hit that time of the year where the UV index is at 3 or above at some point in the school day.  At the moment students are being told when they need their hats, which has been at least morning play until about 1:30 pm each day.

Students who do not have hats will be moved into the 'No Hat, No Play' area of the school. 

Planning Week

Next week the Specialist timetable will be altered to provide teaching and learning teams additional time together to plan Term 4 learning programs. Students will participate in their specialst classes on one day, with some minor changes. 

2020 Planning

It seems to come around a little quicker each year but we are at the time of year where we are beginning to look into our school structures for 2020. This is based on the number of students who we anticipate being at Marlborough in 2020. I would ask families that if your child will not be attending Marlborough next year (other than our current year 6 students) it is important for us to know so that we are able to settle on structures for 2020. Similarly, if you have a child who will be starting school in 2020 and have not enrolled through the office I would ask that this task is completed by the end of this week so that we are able to firm up our anticipated enrollments and make strategic decisions based on this information. As always, I am happy to meet with families who would like to discuss their thoughts for 2020.

In 2020 we will be returning to our usual model of multi-age classes (1/2, 3/4, 5/6) as well as our Foundation students having their first year of school as a year level on their own. 

NAPLAN 

Over the last week our Year 3 and 5 students NAPLAN results were provided to the school. I firmly believe that the assessments that students sit provide a snapshot of how a student performed on the day of the assessment and as parents it is a little like looking at a photograph of your child at one point out of 7 years of schooling in that it reflects a given point in time, but does not show the true story of the growth and learning. 

As a school, we use NAPLAN to look at how our programs are impacting students over time. While we are still digging more deeply into what the 2019 data is telling us, one of the standouts for me is in our 'Student Growth' data for Numeracy.  We receive 5 year trend data telling us how our school has performed each year and we track how this is improving as a school and relative growth data where we can see how individual students have tracked between Year 3 and 5 and then also Year 5 and Year 7.

Our student growth data in Numeracy is outstanding for the second year running, which gives us as a school feedback on the work we have been undertaking over the past two years on Numeracy. This affirmation allows us to know that the work we have undertaken has been the right work to improve student outcomes. All staff have worked incredibly hard on their own practice and skills to provide our students with an outstanding numeracy program across the school. 

We will use this information we will make strategic choices about our focus for 2020 as a school, and which area of Literacy we will have as a main focus.