Principal
Home-School Communications
From time to time, parents/carers need to make enquiries or lodge a concern about their son or a matter pertaining to their enrolment here. My office receives hundreds of calls from parents and carers wishing to speak to me directly. I only wish I had the time to call you all back! There simply aren’t enough hours in the day. And even if I had more time, when I do contact parents/carers, it’s in regard to a matter that I have no background knowledge about. I am often off-site at meetings and other commitments and often a week will go past before I can address the matter.
I urge parents/carers to read the table below and when a matter arises, that it is taken up with the relevant person whose job it is to oversee that activity/group of students/curriculum area. If the matter does not get resolved, escalate it to the next person in seniority. Ultimately, if matters cannot be resolved or they are of an urgent and serious nature, they will come to me, and I will contact you.
Allow for 48 hours from when you leave a message via phone or email. Teachers’ primary duty of care is the delivery of classes and in the ‘back-end’ of teaching, the teachers can often be out on professional learning, on excursion with another year group or at home unwell.
Curriculum | ||
|---|---|---|
| Initially | Then | Finally |
| The Subject Teacher (Secondary) or the Class Teacher (Junior School) on aspects of your son's progress in a particular subject area, the content of a particular subject, performance in a particular assessment, conduct in a particular class | Heads of Department (Secondary) or the Junior School Curriculum Coordinator in matters such as placement of pupils in classes, overall assessment/testing policies, teaching programs | The Director of Curriculum or Director of Junior School on matters such as formation of classes, a boy's overall curriculum pattern, College assessment/ testing policy, selection of subjects |
Wellbeing | ||
|---|---|---|
| Initially | Then | Finally |
| The Homeroom Teacher (Secondary) or the Class Teacher (Junior School) on particular aspects of your son's overall academic, social, physical and spiritual development within a particular year, including matters such as discipline, peer relationships, attendance | The Year Coordinators (Secondary) on ongoing aspects of your son's overall academic, social, physical and spiritual development within a particular year including matters such as discipline, peer relationships, attendance, teacher-pupil interaction. Also available are the Careers Advisor and College Counsellors | The Deputy Principal, Director of Wellbeing or the Director of Junior School |
Co-curricular | ||
|---|---|---|
| Initially | Then | Finally |
| The team coach or Manager in Charge (MIC) of the activity on particular matters relating to team training sessions, team expectations, selections and venues | The Secondary Sports Coordinator or the Junior School Sports Coordinator on general College policy relating to co-curricular and extra-curricular expectations, sports played, selection | The Director of Co-Curricular |
Fees / Finance | |
|---|---|
| The finance office on particular questions relating to fee accounts | The Director of Business Services on general College financial policy, all matters relating to fee accounts |
Public Transport | |
|---|---|
| The College Receptionist for bus/train enquiries | Deputy Principal |
Our New SPC APP is here!
We are finally ready to roll out our new school app. Before commissioning this app, the school primarily relied on email to communicate with its parent community, leading to email fatigue and little engagement. The St Patrick’s College Leadership Team determined that a single channel of communication was not optimal and needed a way to communicate with parents and carers without saturating their messages. Here it is!
In this first week, we would like you to download the app and navigate it. The most important thing I can stress is that to avoid being overwhelmed by push notifications, go into Settings and set your Subscriptions. That is; the Year that your son(s) is(are) in - the Co-curricular activity he is involved with.
Once we are all familiar with the new app, we will retire the much beloved Sports Team app so that we have one form of communication that is quick and convenient for our community. Links to the Parent Lounge and Student Café are there for convenience as is the 2022 Calendar.
Please be patient as we slowly but surely populate the app with ALL the activities we have going on at St Patrick’s College. For a while we may still send emails as we ensure all of our parents/carers have access to a smartphone.
Dr Vittoria Lavorato
Principal
SPC boys can do anything!
**except divide by zero