Department for Education Strategic Plan
The Department for Education has set its sights on building a world class education system and has recently updated its 10 year strategic plan. Key components of the plan include:
· Support for leaders and teachers to continue to build and strengthen the skills and knowledge needed to enable growth for students.
· Promote and facilitate engaged families and communities.
· The presence of appropriate support services to assist student learning and engagement.
· Allocation of resourcing and investment to ensure the quality and sustainability of public education.
As a part of this as plan, every school has an improvement plan that focuses on increasing outcomes for every student in Literacy and Numeracy. We are in the final year of our current 3 year improvement plan and over the next few months, we will be reviewing our progress towards existing goals and setting future directions. The school's current goals are focused on improving student achievement in writing, reading and mathematics. The school uses a range of achievement data to monitor student progress, including NAPLAN and the recently undertaken PAT Reading and Mathematics assessments. It is anticipated the achievement reports for this year’s NAPLAN will be made available to families in the coming weeks.
Pupil Free Day
Next Monday our staff will be participating in a professional development day focused on Literacy. As mentioned above, building the writing skills of students is a key area of growth and a strategy that the school has implemented over the past few years to support our work with students is a program called Brightpath. In Brightpath, teachers assess their students’ writing performance by making an on-balance judgement using a specific set of criteria. There are many components of writing, such as: spelling, grammar, sentence structure and subject matter. On the day staff will be looking at the area of vocabulary. Children can ‘up-level’ their writing through the effective use of vocabulary. For example, choosing descriptive words can help the reader form a picture in their mind of what is happening, adapting word choices to suit your audience can increase impact and using a variety of vocabulary can keep the reader interested.
Student Wellbeing Survey Reflection
Earlier in the year our yr 4-7 students completed the Department for Education’s Wellbeing and Engagement Survey. The survey covered a broad range of areas including children’s views about their Emotional wellbeing, Connectedness to school, School climate, Bullying, Perseverance and Cognitive engagement.
The survey results have provided an opportunity for staff to reflect on these areas. Some key take away points included increased levels of positive wellbeing being reported in all bullying types (physical, verbal, social and cyber) and school belonging. Our staff strive to stretch students in their learning along with developing their habits as effective learners; survey results noted an improvement in their cognitive engagement and perseverance.
As a part of our ongoing focus on student wellbeing and building student capacity in this area, we have booked an information session for our yr 4-7 students on the topic of Cybersafety. The session will cover a range of topics including: cyberbullying, digital footprint, social media, protecting online identity and other strategies for staying safe online and being a responsible digital citizen.
Home-School Communication
A valued element of school life is the presence of regular communication between home and school. All staff at Henley Beach are committed to ensuring parents and caregivers have the opportunity to discuss their child's learning progress. Teachers can be contacted at any time throughout the term, or alternatively, your child's teacher may also contact you if they have any areas that they wish to talk with you about. In light of COVID-19 guidelines, a level of flexibility with the format of these catch ups is necessary (eg. a telephone call) which can be negotiated between yourself and your child's teacher. If you would like to speak with your child's teacher, please contact them via email, Seesaw or calling the front office.
School events
This week our students are representing our school in two valued extra-curricular opportunities; the Primary Schools Choir Festival and Tournament of the Minds. Good luck to all students involved and thanks also to Mrs Sourbis and Mr Wuttke for coordinating these activities. We are also looking forward to tomorrow’s school disco. Thank you in advance to the parents and staff who will be assisting with this whole school event.
