2025 Annual Improvement Planning

Next Tuesday 19^th November, our Leadership and Curriculum team will meet to review our data and complete our Annual Improvement Plan (AIP) for 2025. We will begin the process of planning key improvement goals, strategies and measures to ensure a cycle of ongoing reflection and improvement. The AIP will be communicated and shared with our community in 2025.

Deputy Director’s Visit

Dr Tony Bracken will visit St Michael’s next Thursday 21^st November to meet the students and staff and see the wonderful teaching and learning occurring across our school. Two of our Community Leaders, Alex and Olivia, will take Dr Bracken on a school tour to highlight our school Vision and Mission and discuss our learning spaces and what makes St Michael’s such a great school.

Reports & Interviews

Semester 2 Reports will be issued via Compass in Week 8, Monday 2 December. Your child’s teacher may request an interview to discuss progress after the reports are released. Parents can book an optional appointment for an interview with teachers from Tuesday 3^rd & Wednesday 4^th of December through the Compass portal. Once the interview booking system is live in Compass, we will advise via a Compass post.

Class Structure for 2025                                                                  

After careful consideration between the school leadership team and Catholic Education, we will be changing the structure of our classes for 2025. The key change is to revert to dedicated classes for Year 1 and Year 2. Our classes will be structured in the following way:

Our assessment data shows that the evidence-based whole-class literacy program, InitiaLit, is delivering significant improvements for our students’ learning. The program is designed to be delivered to individual year levels across K to 2. We are focussed on ensuring that each child achieves key literacy milestones which are known to improve life-long learning outcomes. The change in class structure aligns with the InitiaLit approach.

We anticipate there will be a range of benefits:

• Less transitions between classrooms. This means less disruption, and more teaching and learning time.
• The class teachers will be able to readily observe student performance across a full range of subjects and target strategies to help improve learning.
• Teachers can still enable higher performers to work on more challenging activities and also target intervention for those students who may need extra assistance.
• Increased interactions with same-age peers.
• Simplified planning of lessons catering for one grade level.

If you would like further information, please feel free to contact us.

2025 Class Groupings 3-6

At this time of year teachers are arranging class groupings for 2025, based on assessment and observations of staff and other professionals. We ensure that we cater for the best learning outcomes and wellbeing of all.

In schools today, classes also engage in a variety of cooperative learning and curriculum groupings where cohorts are blended, and the class structure is a more fluid arrangement. As we are a small school and classes often combine for subject areas, students are in a good position to maintain friendships even if a friend is in another class.

We will follow current practice to work with any families of students with complex needs around transitioning classes for 2025. If you sense your child is anxious about next year, please chat to your child’s teacher. It’s important to have positive conversations, reminding students of a challenge where they succeeded, or an event that worried them that turned out to be a positive opportunity.

Our teachers put your child first in every decision they make about wellbeing and learning and have made sound professional judgements around the class groups for 2025.

Community Council

Our Community Council met on Monday to discuss upcoming events and to give feedback on Community Council model that was implemented in 2024. It was decided that current positions would continue into 2025 and that expressions of interest from new parents to join the Council Executive would be opened early in Term 1, 2025.

The Positions for Community Council Executive currently held are:

• Chair: Evan Thomas
• Treasurer: Dan Kiley
• Secretary: Caitlin Blackford
• Parish Priest: Fr Mick
• General members: Garret Metz, Hannah McNamara, Ann MacNeill and Ryan Walsh.
• School members: Principal, Assistant Principal plus a Teacher Representative

The Community Council Executive meets twice per term through the year.

Our Community Council is always happy for parents to join sub-committees called ‘working groups’ to help organise events across the year such as a working bee, Christmas event, Mother’s and Father’s Day stalls, etc. These working group members do not need to attend all Council meetings: they just need to join a working group meeting or liaise with Community Council representatives on an as needs basis. In 2025, we will be looking at new ways to expand fundraising to further support initiatives across the school.

Thank you to our parents as our Community Council has recently agreed to pay for our end of year Graduation Dinner for our current Year 6 students.

I would like to take this opportunity to extend my deep appreciation to our 2024 elected members and to all our parents who have contributed to our working groups. We could not do this without our wonderful community! A huge thank you to Caitlin as she will be resigning from her position on the Council as her son is moving on to high school. Caitlin has been a great support over many years.

Many blessings,

Bridgette McCann

Acting Principal