Change to Curriculum Reporting Comments and Time of Distribution

I am pleased to announce that after consultation and agreeance with our school’s P and C, there will be a change to how we communicate your child’s academic progress in their report cards.

Student report cards will now be streamlined and less condensed in the subject area comments. From now on your child’s report card comments for each subject area will be a brief informative passage of what your child learnt for the semester. Accompanied by an effort grade and an overall achievement grade.

At our face to face parent/teacher interviews, teachers will be able to go into personalised, in-depth detail about what curriculum descriptors your child has progressed from and are working towards. We also encourage you to keep in regular contact with your child’s teachers and have these discussions throughout the year.

Teachers will still write a personalised comment on your child’s behaviour at school and an overall comment regarding your child’s progress.

Report cards will also be issued a little later than usual to maximise learning time at the end of term 2. Instead of report cards being distributed at the end of term 2, they will now be issued slightly later at the end of the first week of Term 3.

Why the Change?

Curriculum comments are extremely time consuming for teachers and simply confusing for parents, with complex, non-parent friendly educational language from the Australian Curriculum.

Nearly every parent we have spoken with gave a common response that they don’t truly read all of (if any) of the curriculum comments, but value more the Effort grade and Academic mark for each subject area. All parents valued the behaviour and overall comments found at the end of the report cards.

Teachers are also usually under pressure to have student assessment completed, marked, moderated and finalised by the end of week 8 of the term to allow time for proofreading and time for the distribution of the reports to happen by the end of the term. With the change, your child will be exposed to more meaningful learning time right up until the end of week 10 of the term, giving them more learning opportunities to understand and demonstrate their learning.

How will you still be informed about your child’s learning?

As a school we have a range of supportive strategies to engage parents and carers in their students educational outcomes, achieved through face to face parent teacher interviews, case management, intervention programs, and parent phone calls from teacher and admin. Furthermore, our doors here at school are always open and we encourage you to keep popping into school to have a chat with your child’s teacher to talk about their learning whenever you can.

Jeremy Callaghan                                                             Christien Payne

Deputy Principal                                                                 Principal