Principals Message

Congratulations to the Class of 2018 and the McClelland College Dux Taylah Simpson

An outstanding result forour 2018 McClelland College Year 12 DUX - Taylah Simpson. Taylah achieved an exceptional ATAR score of 98.6! We are extremely proud of Taylah and all of the hard work she has put in over the years she has spent at McClelland College. We recently celebrated with her at the Awards on Tuesday night along with many other students throughout the College who achieved academic excellence awards. Congratulations to all of our students who tried their best this year and I encourage you all to have a safe and enjoyable break and look forward to seeing you all back on day 1 which is Wednesday 30th January. Merry Christmas to you all!

Mobile Phone Policy Change

It has been reassuring to hear from so many parents (and a number of students) who have indicated their support for the update to our mobile phone policy. Had there been a change of state government our policy would have been mandated as was recently the case in NSW schools. I’m pleased to say that we went through an extensive consultation period and process which involved hundreds of students being surveyed, as well as parent, staff and student focus groups, before we decided on the policy. School Council (which involves all three groups) had a lot of healthy discussion and debate before finalising this policy which aims to help avoid distractions and address mental health concerns that are growing.

Students now spend hours a day interacting with Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, texts, tweets, and other social media. At the very time when newer standards demand that students think and read texts more deeply and carefully, our students come to us with less practice doing so… They have been trained to swipe as soon as they get bored, which makes it more difficult for them to keep engaged and build their learning stamina which is essential if they are to be successful and achieve their goals in life. We hope our change in policy can also have a positive impact on students over reliance on social media at home. I encourage you all to discuss this with your family about this and strongly recommend watching this youtube video as a great way to get the conversation started. We could all do with a little less screen time and more time interacting with one another and enjoying the real world.