Principal's Page

Thank you to our HEPS community. I have had a really positive and warm welcome back to our school after returning from my holiday. I feel very lucky to be part of such a caring community and to be able to say I love the work that I do.

This term we welcome 24 international students. They will each be at our school for approximately four weeks. The children are attending HEPS to gain an experience of Australian schooling. We wish them well in their visit to Australia. 

The 14th July is a student free day. As a school, staff are working to further develop their professional practice in the teaching of Maths and in both providing challenge and support to all children in their classrooms. Catherine Epstein, educational consultant from the Maths Association of Victoria, will engage our teachers in planning learning activities that enable our students to develop in the four Maths proficiencies; Understanding, Fluency, Problem Solving and Reasoning. To share our knowledge and strategies to support children at home we will be running a parent information evening on Wednesday 26th July. 

The first weeks of term have many extra learning activities for our students. This provides students with not only fun events but opportunity to use skills in new and different situations. Some of the events in July include; the Winter Sports Gala day for Level 5 & 6, a Japanese incursion for Levels 3 - 6, Connect group, whole school reward day, Foundation 100 days at school ...  Teachers are busy planning further experiences and these will be communicated via Compass at the appropriate times.

Production preparation has begun! Emma Austin and her team are busily preparing for this whole school event. Emma will be providing information throughout the term.

We are anticipating the hard copy of NAPLAN results to be delivered to HEPS early next week. We will be mailing these to families as soon as possible after they are delivered to school.  It is important that you ensure that the school has your current postal address. We do not have spare copies of the results and are unable to generate new documents.

I am wanting to let you know of some changes to this year’s reporting. These are changes being introduced nationally by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA).

NAPLAN will continue to measure student achievement in numeracy, reading, writing, spelling, and grammar and punctuation but the results will now be presented in 4 proficiency levels:

These are:

· exceeding

· strong

· developing

· needs additional support.

This change will give schools, parents and carers clearer information that details student achievement against new proficiency levels.

Students’ NAPLAN reports will continue to show how they are tracking against their peers and provide an indication of their skill levels against national averages and where we would expect them to be in order to get the most out of schooling. This provides valuable information to teachers about how we can continue to support your child.

Each set of NAPLAN results is an important milestone but it’s also important that students know that one result does not define them – these results are about making sure every student gets the support they need so they can continue to get the best from their learning.

Please talk with your child's class teacher, Lou, Marcus or myself if you have further questions upon receiving your child's report.

We have begun the first important steps in our new building project. This has seen the development of a document that outlines the vision for how we will be working to support student learning into the future. As this is reviewed by external stakeholders and more concrete plans formulated we will keep the community informed.

We are looking forward to a busy and exciting term.