Principal Team Report

Working Bee Cancelled

With the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have made the difficult decision to postpone this Sunday's working bee.  A big thank you to those families that were keen to attend but the responsible decision for now is to minimise adult to adult contact and to maintain 'social distancing'. 

Parent & Carer First Aid Course Postponed

Please note that this will now be held in Term 3 or 4 with dates confirmed as soon as possible.

Remote Learning Padlets

As per previous messages, the school is still focused on delivering a school based teaching and learning program. While teachers are not expected to maintain both the home and school learning environments concurrently, we appreciate and respect that an increasing number of families are making the decision to keep their children home from school.

To support families that have made the decision to keep children at home, our teacher teams (including our specialist teachers) have put together a broad range of optional learning activities (via Remote Learning Padlets) for your children to engage with. It will be up to each family to decide what activities are best suited to your particular family context. When discussing home learning with your children, all families are encouraged to provide feedback through an appreciative lens. Finding three strengths (i.e. what's working well) and one 'even better if' (i.e. an improvement or growth opportunity) is one way that you can approach these learning conversations. At this time and while schools are still open, the management and follow-up with students regarding these tasks is the responsibility of parents. If the school closes, this will change as the school will become a remote learning setting - managed by teachers and with the support of parents.

Maintaining a Sense of School Belonging

So that absent students can remain in contact with their classroom teacher, we ask that these students (only those who are absent) upload *one piece of work per day * that they are particularly proud of via Seesaw. Teachers will then endeavour to comment on the uploaded pieces of work in a timely manner. All families will have received the Seesaw Home Learning Codes today. If you have not yet received your codes and/or need assistance with this, please email your child's classroom teacher. Please note that Year 6 students will be able to login to Seesaw via their Google accounts.

Lastly, I would like to thank all staff for their professionalism and resilience during what are very uncertain times. As always, updates regarding COVID-19 will continue to be shared with the community as they come to hand.

Advice Regarding Seesaw

Some families have had a few problems accessing SeeSaw at home.

• You will need to update your Seesaw app if you have not updated it recently.
• Then you will need to sign out of your account, and sign in by clicking on the ‘I am a student’ button (not ‘I am a family member’).
• Instead of signing in with the QR code, there is a line at the bottom for the text code to sign in as the Student from home. From the student account, the student has a range of upload options (e.g. photo, video, etc)

If you have any further issues please contact your classroom teacher.

2020 NAPLAN Cancelled

Message from the Education Council Secretariat

Education Ministers met today and decided that NAPLAN will not proceed in 2020. The NAPLAN test window was scheduled to be held from 12 to 22 May.

All Education Ministers acknowledge and thank all of our school leaders, our teachers and support staff for the essential work they do every day educating our children and young people, particularly during these challenging times. They are all playing a vital role in managing the response to COVID-19.

Education Ministers reiterated that the National Cabinet has agreed, on the advice of the chief health and medical officers, that “pre-emptive closure of schools are not proportionate or effective as a public health intervention to prevent community transmission of COVID-19 at this time.” The advice of the Chief Health and Medical Officers is available at this link.

The decision to not proceed with NAPLAN in 2020 has been taken to assist school leaders, teachers and support staff to focus on the wellbeing of students and continuity of education, including potential online and remote learning.

Further, the impact of responses to the COVID-19 virus may affect the delivery of NAPLAN testing, including the operation of centralised marking centres and the implications for nationally comparable data if an insufficient number of students are available to do the test.

The decision to not proceed with NAPLAN in 2020 also means that the scheduled testing of the NAPLAN Online platform, known as the Coordinated Practice Test (CPT), will not proceed. Ministers acknowledge the work that departments and schools have undertaken in preparation for the anticipated CPT which was due to commence next week on 23 March.

Education departments and systems will continue to closely monitor health advice and work with schools to ensure appropriate support for students and staff as the response to COVID-19 develops.

AWE Student Wellbeing Surveys

A critical component of our school's strategic approach to improving the wellbeing and empowerment of students is that we gather information and feedback from students through the Visible Wellbeing Survey and the AWE (Assessing Wellbeing in Education) student wellbeing assessment. These surveys and assessments provide the school with important data which helps teachers ( and the school's leadership team) to be more precise in providing students with the support and learning opportunities required to improve student wellbeing and mental health.

The AWE assessment consists of a collection of validated psychometric scales and scientifically informed questions from the psychology literature that assess various aspects of wellbeing. The AWE assessment covers all major theories of wellbeing, rather than one particular theory or perspective.

The assessment is balanced with regard to the span of assessment (i.e., asking about today, yesterday, last week, in general) consistent with the sensitivity of the constructs measured.

All students from year 3-6 will participate in the AWE assessment of wellbeing over the next week.

Assessment Measures of Students Experiencing Bullying

While over the last 3 years (2017-19), the school has seen a decrease in student reports of bullying from 20% down to 13% (via the annual Student Attitude to School Survey), the AWE assessment of wellbeing is set up so that the school gets an alert if a student responds at a certain level to 'bullying' related questions.  This will enable the school to intervene and provide students with the support required to ensure that students are supported - even if they haven't reported a concern to a teacher or parent. All other survey responses are kept confidential and individual student results cannot be accessed by the school.

If you do not want your student to participate, please contact your child's classroom teacher by the end of the week.

Further information about the AWE Assessment of Wellbeing can be access via:

Alternative Timetable Trial - next week

Next week is Planning Week. This is a time where all year level teams (Prep to Year 6) and the Specialist Team spend the day together reflecting and planning for Term 2. There will be a particular focus this week on preparing staff, students and families for remote learning in the case of a school closure.

During Planning Week (March 23 to March 27) we are also exploring a new timetable concept. We will be offering students 3 smaller breaks within their day rather than the normal 2 breaks.

As a staff, we are interested in any impact this has on student wellbeing, energy levels, focus, social behaviour and the nature of their outside play. Whilst student numbers are lower at the moment, we will still proceed with this trial with a view to do another once we are back at near full capacity.

There still will be 6 academic sessions per day and the same amount of time set aside for students to eat their snack and lunch.

CodeCamp Online Program

Unfortunately CodeCamp is no longer able to run their on-campus program at Auburn South over the Autumn school holidays.

As an alternative, CodeCamp will be offering a FREE ONLINE PROGRAM  for students to help them continue their coding journey.

Details can be found on the flier below.

Friendly Reminder - Parent Payments

The 1st instalment of the parent payments are due to be processed on 23 March.  If any of your details have changed, eg new card, new expiry date please contact our Bursar, Sue Burnell-Armstrong in the school office.