From the Principal 

Dear Parents and Carers,

It’s been an amazing week having our students back and beginning to go back to normal. At this stage we are trying to provide as many opportunities as possible whilst still maintaining a COVID Safe stance. I would like to thank all of our wonderful community for how responsive and adaptive everyone has been to the staggered starts and finishes we have had to implement in line with DET advice. Our students have been awesome in their resilience and persevering with the ever-changing rules. 

In Term 2 we had our 4-year School Strategic Plan Review. I would like to thank all of the school community for their feedback and input into our review and in particular the members of our community who made time to meet with the School Review Panel. The School Review is conducted by an independent body alongside the Department of Education Senior Education Improvement Leader for our network, two other principals and our School Council President. As I am sure you will agree, our school is amazing; we have excellent teachers, a very supportive school parent community and underlying all of these is our brilliant student body; of whom we are very proud of. The Review process has now been completed and we are currently writing our next Strategic Plan to take us through to 2024, this plan will have a core focus on Student Learning Growth.

I wanted to share some of the highlights the Review had found with you. The Panel found that the Reading Nights Program, Performing Arts Program and Wellbeing and relationships within the school community were all highlights specific to Somerville Primary School. Looking at some of the targets for the 2017-2020 Strategic Plan, Somerville made huge growth our students working in the Top 2 bands of NAPLAN for Reading in Grade 3. Conversely, the number of students achieving low growth decrease from 24% to 15%, which is outstanding. We also received some excellent feedback in regard to increasing our communication with parents over 2017-2019, this has seen a significant increase over the period of the strategic plan. 

At our last School Council meeting we have been reviewing a number of areas including looking at the communities needs for a canteen facility, thank you to everyone who has completed the survey we already have over 200 responses! We have also sent out the Parent Opinion Survey to a random selection of families. I would strongly encourage all families who have received the survey to complete it. We have an outstanding school; we seek and value parent and community feedback. 

At School Council we also have been looking at the uniform and how students wear the uniform. The Somerville Primary Uniform is a wonderful and very smart looking uniform. I ask that parents to click the link to our school uniform policy and make sure your child is wearing the uniform correctly. Both Raelene and I will be conducting regular Uniform checks and our School Leaders will also be visiting classes to remind everyone what is expected with the school uniform. Thank you for your support with implementing this. 

https://www.somervilleps.vic.edu.au/mdocs-posts/sps-uniform-policy

As we move quickly towards Term 4, we are still accepting Foundation 2022 enrolments. We have an information evening on the 18th of August that will be run via Webex, please email the office if you would like the Webex link or if you have enrolled your child but not received the confirmation letter with the link. One benefit of COVID has been we had to modify how we conducted our Kinder/School transition. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive and we will continue to run our transition the same way with small groups for shorter periods of time, this enabled the teacher to get to know the students better and also for the students to make better connections with their peers and the teachers. If you have held off enrolling due to not being able to complete a tour due to COVID and would like to know more about how we can best support your child at Somerville, please call the office and have a chat to me. 

Over the next 5 weeks we have made some adjustments to our staffing following Rebecca Mioduszewski being appointed to an acting role at Somerville Rise. Shane Gagiero will be replacing Rebecca during this time and Cassandra Bray will be replacing Shane in PE for the rest of the Term.  I am sure you will wish Rebecca all the best and I am confident that Shane will be an excellent replacement for Rebecca. 

As always I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend and I look forward to seeing everyone tomorrow ready for the Somerville Olympics! 

David Tapp

Acting Principal