Dear Parents/Carers,                                                                        

I’d like to welcome everyone back for term 3. Term two was such a huge agenda and the work of the P and F building community at St Paul’s was so significant. Last term we shared:

• St Paul’s School Fete - the highlight for our students;
• Grandparents and Great People Day - the second most important highlight for the our students;
• Mothers Day Stall
• School Cyclic Inquiry, where we formulated future directions for our school.
• And we had a significant financial audit of our management processes, something that happens every four years. This was highly successful and I would like to acknowledge the work of Mrs Bronwyn Roberts for being such a professional steward of this area.

The School Cyclic Inquiry has set the school up to be future focused and we have three areas that we, as a school community, will seek to place even greater focus. I will share some of this with you, but over the term I will seek to provide more detail as the planning of a new Strategic Plan for St Paul’s begins to take shape from this process.

Our three key areas of focus on our new plan will be:

• Nurturing and enriching Catholic identity.
• Improving student learning outcomes.
• Enhancing the wellbeing of staff through promoting co responsibility and the core work of teachers.

These key areas will be “unpacked” further with you in future newsletters.

When I reflect on our work from last term I actually see a school that has tried to live and journey together in a way that I would call holistic living. I see this as the ongoing maturation of a learning community that seeks to integrate the spiritual, emotional, intellectual and practical dimensions of one’s being. If we do this well as a community, we are modelling to the students all about the meaning of living a “good life”. I would define a “good life” as one that is lived with purpose that enhances the common good and the fulfilment of each individual’s potential (clearly articulated in our vision).

So how do we respond when planning for the future in moving forward with our three key areas? Across all three key areas we need to provide learning and teaching with a broad vision of how people might live in harmony. This will ensure our horizons are expanded and we creatively find ways of moving forward our new strategic plan as we respond to a constantly changing environment and world view. The speed of social change and the multiplying of knowledge at such a rapid rate means that during one lifetime a person will need to make several major shifts in consciousness and life skills. This reflects our St Paul’s vision:

Go Gently,

Michael Reardon
Principal