Leadership Report

Dear Saltwater Community, 

Welcome to week nine. It has been a great first term of the 2023 school year, with the term break fast approaching in two weeks. We sincerely hope that you all had a wonderful long weekend and were able to take advantage of the extra day to rest up and enjoy the outdoors before the last stretch of Term One. 

Hamony Day Celebration - 31/3/23

Harmony Day  will be celebrated at our school on Friday 31st March. We encourage our students to wear orange clothing or accessories, or even just a touch of orange! Another option is to come dressed in clothing attire representing cultural significance. Harmony Day is a celebration of our cultural diversity – a day of cultural respect for everyone who calls Australia home.

Late Arrivals

Thank you to all our families who arrive at school on time each day. We would like to provide a friendly reminder that Primary students are expected to arrive between 8:20am - 8.30am when classroom doors open, ready for lesson instruction at 8.30am.

Secondary students should arrive 8:50am, ready for instruction at 9:00am.

There are still currently a large number of families arriving after the instruction time begins, which is disruptive to student learning. A student arriving late disrupts classroom learning because it interrupts the flow of a lesson, unsettles other students and the teacher may have to re-explain tasks. If all families could make a conscious effort to arrive on time to minimise disruptions to learning, it would be much appreciated.

Naplan Assessments Continued

NAPLAN stands for ‘The National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy’ and is a national assessment taken annually in March. Students are assessed in reading, writing, language conventions (spelling, grammar and punctuation) and mathematics. Our school has completed administering the NAPLAN assessments throughout week 9.

Students and parents can often feel anxious whilst waiting for the results of the NAPLAN tests. Reports from your child’s NAPLAN testing will be received by schools between August - September, although this is yet to be confirmed as NAPLAN was held in March this year. You can reassure your child that even though the results do identify where they are compared to national standards, they are only based on the student’s skills on that day and in specific conditions and do not represent their ability overall. 

We are proud of our students and the effort and stamina they have shown during the testing period, and every day of the school year!

We would like to express our gratitude to the staff support team, especially Ryan and Joe from the leadership team, Year 3, 5 and 7 classroom teachers, ES staff members who helped small groups or provided additional support, and our ICT team, as preparing for NAPLAN online is a mammoth task.

Local Excursion Forms

A friendly reminder that if you have not already filled out the local excursions form on Xuno, to please do so at your earliest convenience to ensure that we can explore our local surroundings on excursions with your children. 

International Baccalaureate Global Conference (Adelaide)

Last week our Assistant Principal / IB Coordinator Michael Nicolaides was joined by Leading Teacher Sarah Mason and Learning Specialists Montana Vunderl-Messis and Maria Nardo at the IB Global Conference that was held over three days in Adelaide. 

The conference featured an extensive line-up of inspirational speakers, staff and peer-to-peer breakout sessions as well as extensive networking opportunities.  

The theme of this conference - 'Education for an inclusive future' explored how navigating the evolving educational landscape requires critical conversations that challenge us to be more open and forward-thinking in our approach to learning and teaching. The benefit of varied perspectives potentially enhances and broadens access to education, holistic pedagogy and the adoption of technologies. Through these differences, the global education community can continue empowering an entrepreneurial generation of change-makers who are equipped to redefine their future.

Hobson's Bay Principals Conference 

Last week, a number of our Principal Class leaders attended the Hobson’s Bay Principals’ Conference held in Lorne. The conference is an annual event which brings together more than 100 school principals within our network, with the opportunity for leaders to discuss and plan for the common priorities in our schools, as well as enabling extensive networking between principals, regional directors and education stakeholders.

The Conference featured keynote speakers and included professional development sessions and group discussions, namely a focus on leading Numeracy Improvement in Schools, information on the new Disability & Inclusion Reform and Koorie Perspectives.

The conference was an important event for co-designing the future of Numeracy education in our network, through the work of keynote speaker Dr Margarita Breed. Dr Breed worked closely with leaders to build and strengthen capacity and confidence in relation to mathematics knowledge for teaching, in particular, the Big Ideas in Number (BIN). She highlighted the intricacies of each of the big ideas and how they relate to each other. As educational leaders and future-makers, we are now able to chart the course of teaching Mathematics in line with the concepts passed on from Dr Margarita Breed.

We look forward to working closely with all our school leadership team to share our learnings and contextualise these to our school context. 

2023 Essential Agreements

An engaging and collaborative learning environment is the most obvious aspect of effective teaching. At Saltwater P-9 College, all classrooms create an essential agreement that is observed throughout the school year. Essential Agreements are not a set of rules and directions, instead they state what the shared norms and expectations are. It is a collaborative action by all those involved in that classroom or team to outline what environment will help everyone learn and achieve, at their best. 

We will endeavour to publish our 2023 Whole School Essential Agreements to our wider community in the coming weeks and we encourage you to read them.  

Thank you on behalf of the Leadership team for reading our newsletter.