Good News Story
Book Week 2022 was celebrated at Port Noarlunga Primary School on Tuesday 30th August. Some of the positives that I took from the day were:
- The best dance yet happened before the parade with all students and staff involved and enjoying it. The dance preparation and performance was the Performing Arts learning for the first 5 weeks of this term for every class. Mrs Chandler put together a fantastic dance and we are very grateful for all that she did.
- The Book Week parade ventured out into the community again this year and was a wonderful experience for students, staff, families, the preschool and our neighbours. Although, in 2023, I think we might need a bigger block to parade around.
- The Book Fair, parade, activities and events have been put together by Tina Jackson. Tina puts in a huge effort to get the week prepared and manages to get everyone involved and engaged. She is highly appreciated here at Porties.
- Thanks to you, the families, who got into the spirit of the day and supported your children by preparing costumes. It was great to see so many of you attend the parade.
Principal’s Update
Welcome to Week 6, Term 3.
This blog is a couple of weeks late – sorry. I have been a little busy with some extra administration and planning. On Monday I was at the Department Leaders’ Day and I was lucky enough to get to share about our wonderful school, students and staff, and our Maths learning. The pride I felt when talking about our culture and learning was enormous and it certainly made up for the extra workload and stress.
External School Review
Another of the areas that is taking time and organisation is our upcoming External School Review (ESR). The ESR will be happening on Monday 12th and Tuesday 13th September. This was delayed from first term due to COVID and we are one of the first schools to be reviewed this year using the revised framework.
Every Department for Education school in the state is reviewed every 3 years and our last ESR was in November 2019. The ESR is an evaluation of a school’s capacity to improve students learning and poses the overarching question: “How well does the school improve achievement, growth, challenge, engagement and equity?” The ESR does not evaluate everything a school does.
The External School Review Framework is structured around four domains:
- Quality school improvement planning
- Expert teaching
- Quality leadership
- Conditions for optimal learning
The review team includes a review officer and a review principal. However, as one of the first reviews this year, we will have a second review officer acting in the review principal role.
Once the review has been completed we will be provided with a summary report and a webpage communication outlining the directions that we must follow for the next 3 years.
While conducting the review there will be meetings with parent groups, the Governing Council, teachers, SSOs and students. The team also undertake classroom walkthroughs where they observe student learning and ask the students questions. This is a scheduling challenge but provides a thorough understanding of the learning that is occurring here at the school.
The Governing Council meeting will be held on Monday 12th September at 5pm, not Tuesday, and will be led by the review team. I am looking forward to seeing the outcome of the External School Review.
Pupil Free Day
On Friday last week the staff team embarked on an excursion. This was due to the planned power outage at the school. I planned the day to run in the same way as a regular excursion and we caught a bus from school to the city.
We pre-ordered our excursion lunches through the canteen using the Qkr! App. Deonne and Vicki had planned a menu for us to choose our recess and lunch from. Then Deonne and Josie prepared and packaged the food for us to take in our individually labelled brown bags. It was an easy and cost effective way to feed the team and to deliciously fill our bellies.
We went to the Art Gallery for a two hour session that was facilitated by the education staff at the Gallery. We rarely get to participate in Arts training and development and this was an engaging and useful session.
After that we had our lunch and then participated in self-guided learning in the museum. I had organised the groups and activities based around the learning that teachers have planned for Term 4. This meant that they could be inspired by the displays and work with their teams on building engaging and challenging learning for their students.
This day had so many benefits and I look forward to participating in the learning alongside the students in Term 4.
I look forward to getting out from under the crazy amount of admin and paperwork to touch base with you all soon.
Take care,
Marie
