Admin and School Leaders

Nut Products at Barwon Heads Primary School 

We are seeking your help to support the students in our school who are at risk of anaphylaxis.

Anaphylaxis is a severe allergic reaction that is potentially life-threatening. The most common causes of anaphylaxis in schools are food allergies. The only way to prevent allergic reactions is to avoid being exposed to the allergen.

Our school is supporting students at risk of anaphylaxis in the following ways:

• training staff,
• encouraging all students to wash their hands before and after eating,
• teaching students not to share food with friends 
• teaching students, the importance of getting help immediately if their friend with allergies looks unwell,
• educating students about allergies and anaphylaxis.

To help manage food allergies, our school is following the National Allergy Strategy Best Practice Guidelines which do not recommend banning foods as this is difficult to enforce and can bring a false sense of safety. However, we discourage parents from sending nut/nut products in their child/ren’s lunchboxes. 

We thank you for your understanding and support in keeping our children safe. 

Curriculum Day - Friday 7 October - No Students

Each year schools receive four student-free days to use for professional development, school planning and administration, curriculum development, and student assessment and reporting.

Our final Curriculum Day for the year is Friday 7th October and the focus for our staff will be reporting practices and student wellbeing. Included on the agenda for the day will be looking at the survey data collected from parents and staff about the aspects of our Reporting Schedule – which includes semester reports, parent communication, goals in diaries and books home. 

We will also be looking at best practise in developing partnerships between school and home knowing that when schools and families work effectively together this enriches the wellbeing, achievement and engagement of our students. 

This Curriculum Day will also include a focus on building the capacity of school staff to identify and support student wellbeing concerns. 

Reducing our Plastic Foot Print

This term our students, particularly our Environment Leaders, would like our school community to put a big effort into greatly reducing the amount of single use plastic that we use. After our students spent time collecting statistics on the amount of single use plastic brought to school, and also seeing how much plastic our garden volunteers were collecting after school, they have become very determined to make a difference in this area. 

We ask families to support as much as you can in reducing the number of single use plastics that come to school and as much as possible to have ‘nude food’ lunch boxes. As our students have reminded us, this single use plastic never goes away, it just breaks down to smaller pieces and as a coastal community we have a responsibility to care for our shared ocean environment. 

Reminders 

• Package free / nude food highly encouraged to our school families and staff. School and year level communication to provide regular reminders of this. 
• Any packaging brought to school must go home. 
• As much as possible students will have recess and lunch eating time in classrooms.