PRINCIPAL REPORT

From the College Principal

Dear Parents/Guardians, Students and Friends, 

You are probably aware that the Department of Education (DET) is very concerned regarding students transition successfully back to school-based learning, and that any negative impacts remote learning may have had on some of our students are addressed as soon as possible.

To enable these two things to occur, the DET has set a number of actions in train over the past few weeks. The two main things it has done, is to write new goals for each school’s Annual Implementation Plan (AIP) and to announce the Tutor Program.

Our AIP now contains three new priority areas for action. The DET document states: 

1. Learning catch-up and extension: Some of our students have thrived in the remote and flexible learning environment, others have maintained their learning progress, and some have fallen behind, despite their best efforts and those of their families and teachers. We will support both those who need it to catch up and those who have thrived to continue to extend their learning. Additionally, we will support those cohorts who were most affected by the lack of usual transitions and establishment practices in 2020 e.g. 2021 preps and Year 1s, Year 7s and Year 8s to ensure successful transitions through their schooling and beyond.
2. Happy, active and healthy kids: We will make sure we look after our students’ mental health and enable every student to get back outdoors, get active and get creative. This means effectively mobilising available resources to support our students, especially the most vulnerable.
3. Connected schools: We will build on the stronger connections that schools have established with their families, carers and communities through 2020 to embed and spread improved ways of working to support our students.

These three statements, mandated to us, will form the basis of our AIP for next year. The school Leadership Team is currently working to construct a plan of action from these broad directives.

The tutor initiative, announced a week or so ago, is a $250m dollar, state-wide, program which is nominally designed to run for the first 26 weeks of 2021. It will naturally assist in achieving the first outcome described above. Of this amount, $230m will be spent in government schools. The tutors will assist students who did not achieve as well in remote learning as we would have expected. 

Our school has received approximately $235.000.00 to employ tutors. Depending on the qualifications and experience, and therefore salary level of the persons employed to do the work, I would estimate we may be able to add an additional 4-6 full time staff for six months to do this work.  

The DET has provided little detail, and no specific implementation model yet, so we are working hard to come up with a system to identify which students we should target this assistance to, recruit staff, gain parent/guardian consent, and design the teaching model (in class, before-after school, outside class- combination of all of these?). It is fortunate that we had already decided to run On Demand Testing for returning students in years 7-10 to identify their literacy and numeracy levels. We will be able to use this data to help inform our decisions around student selection into the tutor program.

I will keep you informed as we do further work on both of these large tasks, but I can assure you, we are endeavoring to ensure all students successfully transition back to school. 

Yours sincerely, 

Richard Minack 

Principal