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We are proud of the way that the vast majority of our students display their commitment to our College SPIRIT values in their interactions with each other at school, at home and in the broader community.
Each day we work to reinforce these values and explicitly educate our students on the most appropriate manner to treat others with respect and inclusivity, and how to take care of their own safety and wellbeing.
The students and staff spoke of how much they enjoyed this device free time to truly engage and interact with each other. The most interesting thing is that they didn’t even realise how much they learnt, as they were having “so much fun”.
Student Wellbeing
As our students begin to enter or move towards their teenage years, there will undoubtedly be some new challenges for our students, their parents and those they interact with at school and in their community. Whilst we do all we can to prepare our students to face these challenges and act with mature consideration and integrity, it will remain true that many of our students will need the guidance and wisdom of the adults in their lives to guide and direct them along the way. Some of the challenges that they may face include:
- Friendship issues
- Puberty
- Sleep patterns
- Healthy and respectful relationships
- Negative influences
- Illegal drugs including cigarettes and alcohol
- Inappropriate online content
- Gaming and online addictions
- Family relationship issues
- And the pressures of increasingly complex schooling demands.
Within our curriculum program we educate our students about how to respond to many of these challenges. We also support them to identity and regulate their emotions, and teach them problem solving processes to better equip them to make informed decisions for their future. This however is a joint responsibility of parents/carers and educators. If parents/carers are unsure of how best to support and guide their child/ren we have staff who are willing and able to assist or point you in the right direction for further assistance if required. You are not alone.
At Foxwell, we set very clear and high expectations for our students. We have observed how our students crave and respect the boundaries and structures that we have set for them. They may not always admit it, but they value these clear and strong boundaries in all areas of their lives.
Later in this (and future) newsletter(s) we will share resources and advice to support our parents and carers to ensure the ongoing safety and wellbeing of our students. Please contact a member of our Administration Team or our Guidance Officer if you require any assistance in these areas.
Curriculum and Pedagogy at Foxwell
We value the partnership with our parents and carers so have also included more detail around our Quality Teaching and Learning Framework and our Curriculum offerings in this newsletter. Again, if you have any questions, our teachers, Heads of Department and Leadership team are always here to assist. We believe that knowledge is power, and together we are great.
COVID-19 Measures
Please be assured that we continue to prioritise the health and safety of our students, staff and families. We continue to ensure appropriate sanitisation and adult social distancing, and have made adjustments to our learning programs and learning environments to ensure that we are all as safe as possible. We assure members of our community that should any notification regarding COVID-19 being within our school community be made, all parents will be advised immediately.
Until next week
Kym Amor
Curriculum
Now that we have returned to school and students have returned to their regular timetabled classes, we thought it would be timely to reintroduce you to our curriculum framework.
Our Year 7 curriculum draws from the eight mandated Key Learning Areas of the Australian Curriculum:
- English,
- The Arts,
- Science,
- Humanities and Social Science,
- Maths,
- Technologies
- Health and Physical Education
- Japanese
In delivering the Australian Curriculum our key focus is providing students with access to knowledge and skills which allows them to demonstrate all aspects of the achievement standard.
In line with our commitment to Deep Learning , while planning our curriculum, we delved deeply into Australian Curriculum to identify purposeful connections between the key learning areas so as to allow teachers and students the opportunity to reduce the time spent on developing wide, superficial content knowledge and increase the time spent on deep learning and student inquiry, students making connections between the curriculum and the world around them.
Our ‘Worlds’ purposefully connect, through both skills and content key learning areas:
- Physical World : Science and Humanities
- Social World: English and The Arts
- Healthy World – Health & Physical Education and Positive Education
- Maths
- Technologies
- Japanese
Please see videos of introduction to the subjects from our Heads of Department.
Assessment & Reporting: COVID-19
At the end of this term, students will receive a semester report. The results on this report card will be indicative only. Students will only receive four results on their Semester 1 report card:
- Physical World
- Humanities
- Science,
- Social World
- English
- Mathematics
In order to provide students with indicative results for these subjects, teachers will be making on-balance judgement based on a wide range of evidence. As a school, we believe this will provide greater equity to our students, who, during at home learning, have had a wide range of experiences and varying levels of support due to individual family circumstances. We feel students, at this time, would be disadvantaged if we only used official assessment tasks to derive their result.
We wish to maximise opportunity for every student to be successful, so teachers and students will work together to compile a portfolio of evidence of student work and teachers will assess this portfolio of evidence against the achievement standard.
This evidence may come from:
- at home learning tasks,
- in class tasks,
- homework activities
- Term 1 progress on assessment tasks, even if they were never finalised.
- Term 1 assessment tasks, if they were finalised.
- Teacher notes
Over coming weeks, students will also be asked to collaborate with their teachers to identify aspects of the achievement standard where evidence of their learning is incomplete, and there will be an expectation that students compile and/or produce evidence which will support teacher judgment, of their learning against the achievement standard. Students will be supported through this evidence gathering process by their teachers. This is not intended to cause stress but rather reduce stress on students as they work , in partnership with their teachers to compile evidence for English, Maths, Science and Humanities.
These supports we are putting in place are designed to ensure Semester 1 reports reflect clearly what a student does know and can do. We believe this approach to reporting will provide greater equity and provide a more realistic judgment of student achievement than we could achieve if we maintained our assessment schedule and only used results from a small number of official assessment tasks.
It has been a busy first week back and it has been wonderful to see students so lively and engaged across all aspects of school life. It has been encouraging to see students seeking out extra support with their class work, sharing their learning and collaborating across a range of groups. Having been out of our usual routines, it can be possible that we have forgotten about some of our ways of working that make it a little easier to manage our work and daily organisation at school so please note the following information.
A reminder: SharePoint can be accessed as a webpage, or as a downloaded application. Students have access to download SharePoint through their Intune Comp Portal app, or directly from the Apple App Store. Once downloaded, students can use their school email address to log in and access their notices. Parents can also access student daily notices via theri student's SharePoint.
It is helpful if students also get into the habit of checking their emails on a regular basis. When personally-relevant information, such as an updated timetable, has been issued via email, a student notice in SharePoint will prompt students to check their email account.
Please take some time in the coming days to discuss this information with your child and to check his/her access to SharePoint.
You can also view the below video for a detailed look at our use of SharePoint.
Teenagers often spend a lot of time online – instant messaging, sharing photos and videos, playing online games and using online chat and voice chat. Additionally, social media platforms can be a big part of their social identity.
Spending time online is a great experience for our teenagers, however we acknowledge that there are risks associated with the different types of content accessed, as well as the different types of associated behaviours.
As our teenagers mature, so do their interactions with online content. Ensuring they are engaging in age appropriate materials, as well as behaviours, can be challenging. As parents and caregivers you know your child better than anyone and have the best opportunity to support and guide them to have safer online experiences.
The Australian eSafety Commissioner promotes online safety for all Australians. The range of services the eSafety commission provides include:
- releasing e-safety support materials and resources for young people and parents
- informing parents on the responsible use of social media
- providing a complaints service for those who experience serious cyberbullying
- identifying and removing illegal online content
- tackling image-based abuse
- providing a directory of resources for parents
https://www.esafety.gov.au/parents
The eSafety Commission identifies 6 key areas where young people require the support and guidance of parents and caregivers while navigating online safely. The following attachment covers these 6 key online safety issues, and includes a range of practical tips and advice for parents.
We highly recommend that all parents and caregivers take the time to review “Online safety – A Guide for parents and carers”.
Further resources are available to assist with helping your child deal with online safety issues at the following web address:
https://www.esafety.gov.au/parents/big-issues
Top ten tips for teenager online safety
- Have an ‘open door’ policy when devices are used in bedrooms, and check in with them regularly to see what they are viewing.
- Ask about their online experiences, who they are talking to online and whether they are having any issues
- Reinforce the importance of protecting personal information and privacy.
- Equip them to use social media responsibly by understanding the age appropriateness of the platform
- Encourage them to think before they post. Asking questions like: Who might see this? Could it be misread by others? Am I creating the right image for myself?
- Remind them that they could expose themselves to risk by sharing personal and inappropriate images of themselves
- Keep doing the great work you are already doing on building self-respect, empathy and resilience
- Encourage them to be aware of the impact of social media on their self-esteem
- Help them understand online risks and what to do about them
- Encourage healthy habits for screentime, and device free time.
From time to time the eSafety Commissioner hosts live webinars that explore the latest research about online safety matters, and are a great way to learn how to support young people to develop the skills to be safer online. All sessions are delivered by eSafety expert educators. Further information about upcoming webinars can be found at the following web address:
https://www.esafety.gov.au/parents/webinars
The following video tutorials are available via our school YouTube Channel:
Privacy restrictions: https://youtu.be/eK0HbNn-3qU
Parental content restrictions: https://youtu.be/jCo5qYZg59o
Setting up parental controls: https://youtu.be/UsqKINzzLY8
Nationally Consistent Collection of Data on School Students with Disability (NCCD)
Every year, all schools in Australia participate in the Nationally Consistent Collection of Data on School Students with Disability (NCCD). The NCCD process requires schools to identify information already available in the school about supports provided to students with disability. These relate to legislative requirements under the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 and the Disability Standards for Education 2005, in line with the NCCD guidelines (2019).
Information provided about students to the Australian Government for the NCCD includes:
- year of schooling
- category of disability: physical, cognitive, sensory or social/emotional
- level of adjustment provided: support provided within quality differentiated teaching practice, supplementary, substantial or extensive.
This information assists schools to:
- formally recognise the supports and adjustments provided to students with disability in schools
- consider how they can strengthen the support of students with disability in schools
- develop shared practices so that they can review their learning programs in order to improve educational outcomes for students with disability.
The NCCD provides state and federal governments with the information they need to plan more broadly for the support of students with disability.
The NCCD will have no direct impact on your student and your student will not be involved in any testing process. The school will provide data to the Australian Government in such a way that no individual student will be able to be identified – the privacy and confidentiality of all students is ensured. All information is protected by privacy laws that regulate the collection, storage and disclosure of personal information. To find out more about these matters, please refer to the Australian Government’s Privacy Policy(https://www.education.gov.au/privacy-policy).
If you would like to know more about the NCCD please find further information in the fact sheet below or on the NCCD Portal(https://www.nccd.edu.au).
If you have any questions about the NCCD, please contact Victoria Leadbeatter, Head of Inclusion