Dear Parents/Carers,

Welcome back to Term 4, usually our busiest term in many ways. Keeping everyone focused on the learning, whilst at the same time completing the necessary planning for next year can often be a huge challenge for everyone.  I thought it was a timely opportunity to share with everyone our NAPLAN performance for 2022. Whilst, despite COVID being such a huge challenge over the past three years, last year’s 2021 NAPLAN results were still some of the best we had achieved over the past three years. Unfortunately our results don’t reflect the same level of growth and improvement in 2022. Below is a short summary of the challenges the results reflect:

Results for each of the five NAPLAN assessment domains of Reading, Writing, Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation, and Numeracy, covering Years 3, 5, 7 and 9, are reported on a common scale. Each domain has a mean score of 500.

Mean Scores For NAPLAN

When I initially looked at our results I obviously found it a concern, especially as we had made such excellent growth and improvement over the previous four years, including the first year of COVID (but those results would have been largely unaffected by the lockdowns and absenteeism). The staff have reviewed the results and we are fully aware of the need to continue to provide explicit teaching in problem solving and strategy reflection in Mathematics as well as focusing on what constitutes a quality piece of writing.  We will establish two goals focusing on these areas during 2023. 

It is also very important to look at the performance of our like schools in the area, and like us, they too had experienced a decline in results across the board in 2022.  In addition, the System diocesan averages also reflected the same concern. One then needs to consider the following challenges that COVID has presented us with to fully understand the context that the results were created in. During COVID the level of absenteeism from school both for staff and students increased exponentially. The data below clearly outlines this. Naturally if the students aren’t at school they can’t learn. Secondly, remote learning is an artificial learning environment that could never provide the same quality of education that face to face teaching can do. In addition, State Government health requirements meant that when children had COVID they had to stay away from school for seven days, initially if you were a close contact, you also had to isolate, so when it went through a family, this could have been considerably more than seven days. Teachers/staff were also required to isolate and not come to work during this period as well, which meant your child may not have had their teacher teaching them every day because of the same public health orders. This is another significant factor that also needs to be considered when reflecting on the above results. I am of the belief, as stated above, there are many factors behind such a decline in our NAPLAN performance for 2022.

The data below identifies the challenges of non attendance at school during the past two years:

Remote Learning Average  2020/2021

Average Student Absences 2020 - 2022

In Summary

As can be seen from the above data, this has obviously had a huge impact on student learning at St Paul’s. With your help, we can turn this around largely by having the students at school more regularly. As these results are an average, some students were considerably better, whilst others were even worse!  Attending school every day makes learning easier for your child and helps children build and maintain friendships with other children.

Finally, it is a condition of enrolment that you send your child to school every day.  Do not keep your child away from school for any of the following: birthdays, shopping, minding other children, routine check ups or haircuts, minor family events or because they’re tired. Medical and other health appointments for your child should be made either before or after school or during school holidays where possible. Also, a reminder that all absences must be explained. Once absences become a concern, the next step is to establish an attendance plan for the child. If all attempts by schools and Systems to improve attendance have been unsuccessful, principals are legally obligated to report such matters to Community Services.

I would like you to share this with your children so that they understand how important school attendance is.

As a school, our goal for term 4 is to lift the level of attendance at school considerably.  Naturally this calls upon our parents to work closely with your child’s teacher to turn this unsatisfactory data around.  

Hopefully with the relaxing of the Public Health Orders attendance at school will improve. Apologies for presenting such a negative picture in the first newsletter for term 4, however, we obviously have a problem in this area that needs to be addressed as it is impacting on student learning.

Go gently,

Michael Reardon
Principal

Principal Awards

Congratulations to the following students who have recently received a Principal Award. 

Athena Atlantis, Amelia Dominelli, Hunter Begovich, Ivy Russell, Alanna Dominelli, Chloe Gray, Mia Mikhail, Isabella Castellano, Annabelle Duggan, Zygmund Costelloe, Tijana Vukovic, Holly Henin, Hudson Wallace, Lavitta Vassallo, Nicholas Macri, Ivy Russell, Rocco Cilia, August Booth, Jax Leckey, Evangelene Bustos, Charlotte Racca, Heath Kemp, Aailiyah Linden, Emily Croke, Jonathan Sparkes-Howarth, Mia McCudden, Chloe Gray, Mia Mikhail, Monique Racca,  Isabella Castellano.