Dear Families, Students and Community Members,

New School Strategic Plan 2021-2024

Following on from our whole school review in Term 3, this term the College leadership has worked on the development of our new Strategic Plan 2021-2024 with staff. Our focus for the next four years will be on the following goals and key improvement strategies as we continue to strive for ongoing improvement across the three key student outcome areas of achievement, engagement and wellbeing.

Goal 1: Student Achievement – to maximise the learning growth for all students 7-12 across all learning areas and pathways.

Key Improvement Strategies:

1a. Improve teacher capacity in VCE with a focus on teacher expectations of student capability, assessment and moderation knowledge and content development from year 7-12
1b. Promote VCAL as a viable and credible pathway for all students and improve teacher capability to deliver VCAL with a rigorous and engaging curriculum
1c. Improve teacher capability to differentiate learning, engage in moderation and provide feedback process to improve learning

Goal 2: Student Engagement – to strengthen voice and improve student agency across the College.

Key Improvement Strategies:

2a. Inquire, develop and implement a whole school strategy with students, parents and staff to embed student voice and agency
2b. Continue to develop teacher practice to use student feedback to improve teaching practice and plan differentiated learning activities

Goal 3: Student Wellbeing – to improve student connectedness and resilience

Key Improvement Strategies:

3a. Review the College practice of Restorative Justice and key aspects of School Wide Positive Behaviours
3b. Develop a consistent approach to student wellbeing, behaviours and connectedness

The leadership team is now currently working on the development of the 2021 Annual Implementation Plan. This includes setting one-year targets to measure our progress and planning the key actions we will focus on during 2021 under each key improvement strategy. We must also take into consideration the Department of Education and Training priorities in recognition of schools post COVID, including the following: -

Learning catch up and extension - supporting students who have fallen behind and those who thrived in Remote Learning to continue to extend
Happy, active and healthy kids - mental health, students being active and support of our vulnerable students
Connected schools - build on the stronger connections with families formed during Remote Learning

We anticipate that what we are planning within our 2021 actions will cover most of this already. However, we may identify a particular need and, therefore, have an initial 6 month focus on it.

Graduation Ceremonies

As you may have heard in the media, graduation ceremonies are allowed but limited in that they can only include the graduating year level and teachers, (no parents or students from other year levels). We must also follow social distancing guidelines and COVID safe procedures, for example, wearing of facemasks except when giving a speech or having a photo taken. Our final assembly to recognise and farewell our Year 12 students, as I reported in my last newsletter article, followed the required guidelines having been pre-recorded the week before and then streamed to all classes in the school and to our Year 12 parents on Thursday 29 October. This has now been formatted into a video for the school to have as a permanent record and will be available to view on our YouTube channel soon. We will send the link out to all families as soon as this is available.

Due to the same public health directions still being mandated for schools, we are planning to follow the same process for our Awards Night, another significant event on the College calendar. To recognise and celebrate the achievements of our students across all year levels, we are pre-recording this event using Woohah Productions and this will be available to all families to watch on 10 December, along with a permanent record being made available to share with our community.

Students who have been nominated for Academic Excellence Awards, Sport Awards, Music and Art awards, various subject awards and our special sponsored awards will be invited to attend our pre-recording session in the Performing Arts Centre on 1 December. This will be staggered throughout the day to include each year level to ensure we are following social distancing guidelines.

Our Awards night is usually 2.5 - 3 hours in duration at the City of Kingston Town Hall, so we need to streamline the event this year. Students who have been nominated for Endeavour awards will have these presented instead in our Year Level Assemblies this term. It is also not possible under the current guidelines to have our usual array of musical and dance performances. However, we will be able to showcase some snippets from the Performing Arts.

Staff Service Awards

On Monday afternoon, following social distancing guidelines, we held the Mordialloc College School Service Awards over a Google Meet, with groups of staff in various locations across the College linking into this event online. This is an annual event we have held since 2016 to celebrate and recognise staff who have spent a considerable part of their career to date at Mordialloc College. It is a most worthwhile event sponsored by the College Council. This year we had six staff recognised and presented with a framed certificate - Janine Danckert, Kathryn Bevan, Stuart McIntyre, Tim Randell, Amelia Hargreaves and me, all for 10 years’ service. We did manage to bring some of the recipients together for a quick photo.

2021 Headstart Program

All families should have received a detailed letter from me last Friday via Compass outlining the details of our three week 2021 Headstart program, commencing on Monday 23 November and running to Friday 11 December for all year levels, thus Years 7-11 roll over to 2021 Year 8-12 classes. This week we are allowing some celebratory activities to occur before beginning the 2021 academic year. Middle School students are participating in some activities following COVID safe guidelines and are also completing their Student Led Conference (compulsory for all students to complete). Students in Year 10 will be completing exams and students in Year 11 will be completing any exam catch-up and some Headstart preparation activities. Further information about this week for Senior School students was communicated by Ms Greenhalgh.

Our Year Level Co-ordinators for 2021 starting in Headstart are: Year 12 Mr Randell, Year 11 Mrs Wilson, Year 10 Ms Hargreaves and Ms Furphy, Year 9 Mr Haber, Year 8 Ms Gorman and Ms Davey and Year 7 Mr Potter and Ms Hockey.

Next Monday we are holding a Whole School Assembly via Google Meet to officially launch the 2021 academic year for the whole school and our expectations of students for the remainder of the year in this program. We expect all students to be taking the Headstart three week program seriously and their attendance, work in class, assigned homework and completion of set tasks will count towards their report for Semester One next year. There will also be a progress report published on Compass for each subject by the end of the school year. We expect that our four core values of Personal Best, Integrity, Respect and Responsibility continue to be evident in how we all work together as a community, with all students demonstrating our core values on a consistent basis. All classes will be involved in developing Codes of Cooperation with their respective teachers during their first lesson.

In the assembly I will be introducing our 2021 student leadership team and our new College Captains, Vice Captains and Middle School Captains will give their first speech in their respective new roles.

New Bell Times

We have made some changes to our bell times and these will commence from Monday November 23. The reason for the change is to ensure a more even distribution of minutes per period throughout the week. Additionally, it provides a better solution for conducting our weekly Year Level Assemblies in our limited big space venues. Now that we have bigger cohorts of students in each year level we need bigger spaces for these assemblies. It also allows our VCAL students to participate in our weekly mentor program. On Mondays, students in Years 10-12 will have Year Level Assemblies and students in Years 7-9 will have their home group or mentor lesson. On Tuesdays, students in Years 7-9 will have Year Level Assemblies and students in Years 10-12 will have their mentor lesson. Whole School Assemblies and House Assemblies will be alternated over these two days to minimise impact on any one day.

Kwong Lee Dow Young Scholars Program

The Kwong Lee Dow Young Scholars program is an academic enrichment program designed to support high-achieving Victorian and select New South Wales and South Australian border school students in realising their full potential. The program provides access to events, activities and resources to give students a head start into university.

Congratulations to Tristan Cox, a Year 10 student in 2020, who was successful in achieving one of the Melbourne University scholarships into this program, which will run for the duration of Tristan’s VCE studies at Mordialloc College. There were over 1500 applications received so a fantastic achievement byTristan!!

Welcome New Staff

We have a couple of new staff starting with us for the commencement of our 2021 Headstart program.

Jillian Samuels, an experienced teacher, is replacing Jenny Tran, who is currently on maternity leave, until the end of Term 2. Jillian will be teaching in our International Student Language Centre and also supporting our current International Students in their respective mainstream programs.

Indigo York, a graduate, is replacing Kym Lenc, who is currently on maternity leave. Indigo has a short term contract with us until the end of Term 1. Lauren McIvor will be returning at the start of Term 2 from family leave and will be taking over this teaching load.

Ms. Michelle Roberts

Principal

VET IN SCHOOL

Why not study to be a pilot while doing your VCE?