From the Principal

Dear Families,

Book Week: What a parade on Friday! So much colour and excitement about our dress up day and parade. It was so great to see many families joining us and a few parents even dressing up too! I think we can add this for next year too and have a few more families dress up. How good are the teachers!!! Their costumes and sense of enjoyment inspires and motivates your children to read and then enjoy the learning from reading. Thanks staff. Anna has been busy creating a Book Week Page on the website since Friday so check out the new link - http://www.ogps.vic.edu.au/index.php/book-week/

Prep 2023: Over the last few weeks we have had our Little Grovers visiting us, beginning to transition to school from Kinder. They have been so wonderful in their session so far and a huge thanks to our families who are supporting their little one in this process. We have also had the Year 4’s who will be the ‘buddy for 2 years’ visit them and read a book and get to know each other. We see this as a great opportunity to get to know a ‘bigger’ person in the school and for our older students to role model and ‘pay it forward’ from their buddies.

Camp: Year 3’s are off to Camp in Anglesea tomorrow for the night. It is a great spot with many activities. Thanks to families for supporting their child to attend camp. Even though it is only 1 night – be prepared for some tired bodies on Friday afternoon! Thanks to the Year 3 team and other staff who attended to make this camp happen.

School Visits: Recently we have had a number of other schools visit us at OGPS. They are hearing great things about our Literacy & Numeracy programs (and our specialist programs!) and come to observe some high calibre teaching. Please don’t take this for granted families. The staff teaching your children are amazing. The visiting teachers have all commented how much they have learnt in a short amount of time and leave here motivated to try replicate what we do here. 

Camp Australia: Jo has told me that the 14th September is going ahead for supervision and care as staff have their Common Professional Practice Day on the Wednesday. Thanks for supporting CAS in this venture to make it viable for them and also, it’s a great program that they provide too.

Policies: Who knew that DET had so many policies! We are always updating and maintaining policies at OGPS and encourage you to have input into them. If you are reading any of the current policies and believe we can improve them, please feel free to reach out to the school with your suggestions. It takes a little bit of time to have them updated and ratified by School Council. We have recently completed a power of work around the Child Safety Standards as they have changed from 7 standards to 11 now. Council is really proud of the work achieved so far and we are in the process of publishing all the relevant policies on our school website. We have even dedicated a sub page of the website, just to the Child Safety Standards and encourage our community to be informed and aware of various procedures and legal requirements.

EBA 2022: Recently the new ‘Agreement’ for Victorian Government Schools was released. It has new elements for all schools to navigate and learn more about. There are some great improvements and some changes that will be evident as we learn more about how to implement this agreement. The biggest factor schools are working through is Time in Lieu. The agreement is based on a 38 hour work week. As a leader, I will try to help staff manage their 38 hours which includes teaching time, planning, meetings, and all the usual things teachers do and we will need to be mindful of the activities that encroach on time out of the 38 hours per week eg: emailing or Seesaw messages out of hours may not be responded to until work time the next day. Other changes will be visible more so in 2023.

Happy Father’s Day: To all the dads, grandfathers, Uncle’s and significant role models in the lives of children out there, we hope you have a great day and are spoilt. The students have dedicated some time recently to help produce a gift for you. Thanks to the P& F team for all the work in making this happen too!

Enjoy the rest of the week.

Scott McCumber

Principal