Newsletter 

 PRINCIPAL'S REPORT

Welcome back to all of our students and families for what I am sure will be a wonderful year. Although there are some new processes and ways of thinking and working together that we are required to do due to the lingering pandemic, we are excited to be commencing this school year on site and with a large degree of confidence that we can safely remain here.

Welcome to our new students and families 

A huge welcome also to our new Year 7 students who commenced at SCSC on Monday 31 January. This year we have 151 Year 7 students joining the SCSC community. They had a great day meeting their mentors, orientating themselves within the school and getting stuck into some learning in a range of subject areas. We also had a BBQ with the Year 12 students which was a wonderful opportunity for them to connect to some mentors and meet the College Captains.

 

We had planned to host a Welcome Picnic on 02 February for families to meet some of the staff and connect to other new families, however due to the operational requirements for the first four weeks of the term, we are rescheduling this event for a date to be advised later this term. In the meantime, please contact your child’s mentor teacher or the Learning Community Leader, Tom McLoughlan, if you need support.

 

We also welcomed 21 new students to the College across Years 8 to 12 this year. We look forward to getting to know them all and their families as we work together in partnership in their learning journey.

COVID Safe Practices

Hopefully my communications via Compass have all been clear about the practices and processes that we have in place to ensure that the College is COVID safe this year. There are a lot of changes to the way that things were working in 2021, with a view to us not again needing to enter into a period of remote learning if we can maintain a safe environment on-site. This will be dependent on our ability to ensure that we do not have large outbreaks of COVID-19 on-site. Many protective factors will support us in managing this as best we can:

  • Engaging in the surveillance Rapid Antigen Testing (RAT). This is voluntary and only positive results need to be reported to the College via the covidresponse@scsc.vic.edu.au email. We thank families and students for being willing to take part in this to help any positive cases that may have gone undetected.
  • Wearing face masks when indoors.
  • Maintaining personal hygiene practices.
  • Maintaining physical distancing where possible.

If anyone has any questions about the College’s COVID Safe practices, or requires support, please email me directly at erin.wright@education.vic.gov.au

Our Priorities for 2022

Our staff spent a lot of time at the end of 2021 working collaboratively in some small groups to help devise our Annual Implementation Plan (AIP) goals for this year.

 

We are excited to be able to approach this year with a higher expectation that we will be able to collaborate in person, on-site as a staff group to work on some of the key improvements that we want to support the College to achieve.

 

In summary, some of our goals this year are:

Learning Priority Goals

  • Targeted strategies to improve Literacy and Numeracy, with a focus on vocabulary, the mechanics of writing, idea generation and measurement.
  • Using student data to track growth and improvement through a new data service, Edapt.
  • Improving staff understanding of and capacity to cater to the specific learning needs of students.

Wellbeing Priority Goals

  • Proactive wellbeing strategies that are co-designed and co-delivered with students.
  • Implementation of a Year 7 to 12 Social and Emotional and Pathways education scope and sequence program.
  • Further developing the role of the mentor and their connectedness to students and families. 

Engagement Priority Goals

  • Improve our attendance data so less students are missing large amounts of learning time.
  • Increasing goal setting and reflection in students.
  • Develop staff capacity to respond to student wellbeing and engagement needs.

Maths Improvement Priority Goal 

  • Improve staff capacity to understand the Numeracy demands of their subjects and cater to these.
  • Improve our knowledge and use of the 4 proficiencies in Numeracy.
  • Improve teacher collaboration in Maths and Numeracy to enable those with expertise to share.

We look forward to sharing our successes and celebrating those of our students across the year with you all.

 

Erin Wright

College Principal