Deputy Principal Update – August 2022

Week 6, Term 3

Our Term 3 Snapshot Reports were submitted by teachers on Friday 19 August and posted home last week. Snapshot reports are to indicate to families if their child is not on track to achieve a ‘C’ grade or higher for the term. Teachers will support students to be successful over the coming weeks and refer them to the Homework Centre if required. Therefore, I encourage families to contact the subject teacher to see how they can work together to support each child to be successful. The Term 3 assessment period closes on Friday 16 September (Week 8).

To support the collaboration and partnership between students, teachers and families, we have two Parent/Teacher Evenings throughout each year, aimed at providing feedback to students and families about their progress throughout the term/semester. This semester we have moved the Parent/Teacher Evening from Week 1, Term 4 to Wednesday 31 August (Week 6, Term 3). This is to align our Parent/Teacher Evening to the Term 3 snapshot reports, aiming to provide detailed feedback earlier in the term/semester for students to action. Communication regarding the Parent/Teacher Evening was sent home last week so that families can make an appointment with each teacher via our SOBS booking system.

The 2023 Course Handbook is now complete and available on the school website. The handbook is available to support students with their subject selection for 2023 via the Course Counselling process. Students should have now completed their selections, either with their Home Group teacher (Year 7, 8 and 9) or with their course counsellor (Year 10 and 11). If students have not submitted their 2023 subject choices into our timetable system they must discuss this with their Home Group teacher as soon as possible. Once all selections are made, the Semester 1, 2023 timetable will be developed and ready during Term 4.

It has now been 18 months since our combined 2020 CIS reaccreditation and External School Review (ESR). We have made substantial progress towards our CIS Recommendations and ESR Directives, which is being documented term by term to ensure we have evidence of our progress for our next review. Notable improvements include:

• Differentiation professional learning, including a the development of a ‘Differentiation Model’ to support staff to differentiate their teaching and learning to support and stretch student learning.
• Intercultural understanding student free day in Term 2 last year, focused on the beliefs and values of students and staff and how we can be culturally and religiously inclusive in our school community. This informed our school Braiding Project in 2021 and will help shape the focus for this year. This work will be continued with our partnership with UniSA with a focus on Culturally Responsive Schooling that we run from 2022-2024.
• A review of our assessment and reporting processes, including a consistent approach to task design to ensure all students have the opportunity to achieve at the highest level. The Assessment Committee and Reporting Committee have led a lot of this work over the last two years and will begin shaping a ‘continuous reporting model’ for the start of 2023.
• The consistent implementation of the Site Improvement Plan challenges of practice by scaffolding all line managers to develop the strategies required to effectively lead systems that build teachers’ capacity to improve practice. This improvement has been led by Brett Hains with support from Principal’s Advisor Daniel Balacco from the Inner West Partnership.