College Head of Learning
Parent Teacher Interviews
If you have not yet booked your Parent Teacher Interviews for Tuesday 23 March or Wednesday 31 March please log into the Parent Portal to do so. Instructions on how to access the portal and how to make bookings were emailed to all parents and guardians on Monday 15 March. Bookings will remain open until 10pm on the evening before each of the interview dates. Additional details about how to connect to the Zoom meetings for these scheduled appointments were emailed to parents and guardians this morning.
If for any reason a teacher is unable to attend a scheduled interview time, we will do our very best to let you know via email as soon as we are aware of the problem. In these cases, the teacher will contact you at a later date to reschedule a meeting time or to arrange a telephone interview.
NAPLAN 2021
In May this year, Aitken College students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 will be participating in Online NAPLAN testing. Year 3 students will complete their writing test using paper and pen; all other tests will be done online. More details about the test types, the test schedule and how you can support your child in preparing for NAPLAN will be sent home early in Term 2.
In order to ensure that all students understand how to use the test platform and to thoroughly test the ICT requirements of the platform, all students who are undertaking NAPLAN online in 2021 must complete a practice test online before the end of Term 1. This will take place in the ‘Co-ordinated Practice Test’ on Thursday 25 March during period 3. Further details have been emailed to all parents and guardians of students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9.
If you have a child in any of the NAPLAN year levels, please make sure they have a working, fully charged iPad and a working set of headphones for the NAPLAN practice test days. NAPLAN tests and practice tests will be completed on iPads using a lock-down browser which students will have to download to their device from the app store prior to the practice test. Links for this browser can be found in My Aitken in the Student Bulletins for today and next week. The lock-down browser allows students to access the test site but which prevents them from being able to access other functions on their iPad (e.g. calculator, dictionaries, Safari) to reduce the chance of student results being compromised.
Tutoring Program
In late December 2020 the Victorian Government announced a $250 million Tutor Learning initiative, aimed at supporting students to catch up on learning they may have been impacted due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. All government schools and eligible non-government schools received funding for this initiative. While this made for very popular headlines in the media, the eligibility of non-government schools was determined by the cost of school fees, and many independent schools received only a small amount of funding.
Aitken College received funding for the equivalent of one full-time teacher-tutor for 2021. While we are grateful for this funding, we are aware that many of our students were effected in some way by the pandemic: academically, socially and psychologically. With nearly 1300 students in our College this has meant that we needed to make very careful decisions about how to make the best use of this teacher-tutor role. After analysis of our 2020 student assessment data to identify which students’ learning was most affected by the pandemic, we decided to focus on the literacy and numeracy needs of students in Prep, Year 1 and Year 8, like many other schools. Students in those year levels were at crucial transition points in their education, being in Kindergarten, Prep and Year 7 during 2020.
To our delight, the data analysis also showed that many of our students’ academic results did not suffer at all during 2020, and in many instances students flourished with the increased independence and the reduction in co-curricular and social activities which normally compete for their attention.
We have employed three part-time literacy and numeracy specialist teachers to provide tutoring support to students in class and in small-group sessions. Ms Phoebe Oti is the Secondary Literacy Tutor and Ms Gabrielle Plummer is the Secondary Numeracy Tutor. They have also been able to offer some tutoring support to a small number of students in Years 8 and 9 this term. Ms Clare Fisher will begin her role as the Primary Tutor at the beginning of Term 2, working initially with Year 1 students and extending into, Prep, Years 2 and 3 as time allows later in the year.
Ms Kerri Batch
College Head of Learning