From the Principal

Dear Parents and Carers,

It was such a pleasure to connect with so many school families over our Middle of Term Breakfast and the pancakes were beautiful. Thanks to our P & F for their ongoing provision of delicious food for our breakfasts each term. Our community is such an amazing part of our school and it is wonderful to have these occasions to be together. 

We are also looking forward to our Colour Run next Friday and there is a great ‘buzz’ amongst students, families, and our staff team here at Golden Grove about our inaugural Colour Run. It promises to be a fun afternoon and one that will create some great memories. A huge thank you to students and families who have been able to also provide some support to the work of the Australian Lutheran World Service through the optional fundraiser as well. Well done to our Student Representative Council who have done an awesome job of promoting the event as well. 

Congratulations to the Year 5 and 6 students who represented our school at DaVinci Decathlon at St Peter’s Girls’ School last week. Our students undertook a variety of academic challenges over the day including English, Poetry, Mathematics, Cartography, Drama, Art, and Science. Well done to James M, Ashleigh H, Charlie S, Sarah J, Jack W, Ava V, Hope E, and Maya S who showed a number of PYP learner attributes over the course of the day. 

We recently had NAPLAN testing for Year 3 and 5 students. These tests occur across Australia and provide our school families with a measure of how children are progressing against some national benchmarks in the areas of literacy and numeracy. One of the strengths of NAPLAN is that it presents us as parents with a relatively easy-to-understand profile of our children. As a school, we also receive the NAPLAN data for our students and we can view the results, weighing up where there are strengths and areas for growth. Used as a diagnostic tool, there is a wealth of information for our teachers and leadership team to work through and use to track student performance over the years. In this way, it is a good research and planning tool, and we will continue to look at the ways we can use this data, along with other assessment data, as a staff team. 

Whilst a focus on data and results can present a temptation to teach to the NAPLAN test, this is not the form of holistic education that we seek to provide, as this can result in student outcomes being a distorted picture of what they can achieve more broadly. This doesn’t mean that we send our students in ‘cold’ – there is a difference between preparing students with some simple exercises and practice tests in the lead-up, as opposed to spending most of the preceding terms drilling students on NAPLAN type skills. Many educational commentators have also been expressing in the media that when a school’s NAPLAN results are publicly advertised in comparative websites and ‘league tables’, that schools can very quickly change from being places of holistic and collaborative learning to competitive institutions where the major goal becomes a desire to ‘out do’ neighbouring or equivalent cohorts of schools. Within this, of course, we do have a key focus on building key literacy and numeracy skills for students, as would be expected of a primary school, and we seek to achieve this in a balanced and contextual way. 

We are about a holistic education; being an educational community that seeks to develop the whole child – emotionally, physically, aesthetically, mentally, morally, spiritually. These attributes are not measurable in a NAPLAN test, but they are pivotal to our vision. The holistic formation is about nurturing well-rounded young people who reflect the diverse array of amazing gifts and talents from God that they enjoy.

Thank you for your patience last week and early this week with the network changeover. We have now been able to connect to the NBN, with fibre optic cable running throughout the school, install a brand new Wifi system with an integrated firewall, and also upgrade all of our network switches. Our download and upload speed has increased from 50 megabytes per second up to 900 megabytes per second which is a pleasing result. We look forward to continuing to grow our integration of technology into teaching and learning with these upgrades that will stand the school in good stead for many years to come. 

This week marked the commencement of National Reconciliation Week. It was a pleasure to attend the Reconciliation SA Breakfast with a number of staff from across our Connected Schools network from St Paul’s and Endeavour College. We are working together on our reconciliation vision statement which will be launched at a combined Connected Schools professional learning day in June. A number of the speakers at the breakfast highlighted the importance of considering actions that we can take to support reconciliation and reconciliation action plans. These will be the next steps that we take as a network and a school to consider the activities that we can engage in both collectively and on each of our sites. 

It has been pleasing to be around the school and to see students wearing the uniform well. We are proud of our uniform and the way that it presents. A reminder that the transition period for the new uniform over the past two years has now run its course, and we would ask for all students to be in the new uniform, please. A copy of our uniform handbook with the descriptions of our range of uniforms is available on the school website. 

We have received a pleasing number of strong applications for our newly advertised school counsellor role and are conducting interviews this week. We look forward to announcing the successful candidate shortly and are confident that we will have the right person to join and add to our Golden Grove community. I would also like to take the opportunity to wish Mr Napier the very best for his time of long service leave coming up in Terms 3 and 4. Mr Napier has been an important member of our school and church community for many years and we prayerfully wish him and his family the very best for this well-earned break. We have commenced our recruitment process to fill this role in Year 5 and 6 over the second semester and continue to be prayerful that God will raise up the right person for this role as well. 

We also have a planning meeting for our school and church community fete this Friday evening (28 May) for interested families. We will meet in the staffroom at the school at 7.00 pm. The fete itself takes place later in the year on Sunday 17 October, however, a big event like this takes some planning! Please RSVP to the school if you are interested in attending. 

Blessings,

Will