Weekly Wrap

Week 1, Term 1

Welcome back to the Year 2020. I trust everyone had a relaxing break and we are all ready for a wonderful year. Across the final stages of 2019, we made some excellent recruitment appointments. I would like to introduce to our community the following staff:

 

• Declan Hutchings – Science
• Adrienne Baucke – Learning Specialist Positive Education
• David Gill – English
• Samantha Harskamp – Wellbeing Counsellor
• Alex Richter – VCD
• Luke Rochford – Maths
• Fernando Pablo – Art
• Romy Bristow – Maths

 

We have great faith in the process we use to recruit great people who are passionate experts in their field, and we have no doubt these staff will work very hard to enrich your child’s learning.

 

We also welcome our new Year 7 students. This is a special day, the first day at High School. We are excited we can be a part of their journey and we are excited we can help them become the very best version of themselves. The staff formed a guard of honour, as the year 7 students were welcomed into Assembly today.

 

 

We also formally acknowledge and welcome those students starting their journey into other year levels. We are also excited and proud that FHC is their school of choice. We look forward to these students adding to our already strong culture.

 

To those students entering Year 12. Make the most of this year and believe in your selves. Understand the power of developing a growth mindset. You can achieve, you can improve. You will benefit from persisting when you are challenged. Everyone will tell you this is a tough year. They will also tell you the year goes by very fast. How about you be the master of your own destiny and make the year what you want it to be. Think back to the young child inside you who started school 12 years ago. What was that child dreaming of? What did that child think success was going to be? Imagine success, believe in your selves and have an awesome year.

 

Assembly today also gave us the chance to formally recognise our student leaders for 2020. Student voice is a very important part of our culture and we look forward to working alongside these wonderful young people to continue building our College.

 

We know that our students are feeling more confident in themselves as learners every year. We know they have greater belief that if they work hard the rewards will come to them. We know that they are more likely to attend school every day because they know this makes a difference. Our students have confidence in their teachers and they found the classroom more focused during year 20 when we put a ban on phones in class. In 2019, the wonderful work our staff have been doing  has resulted in the following achievements.

 

• Forest Hill College has been identified as 1 of 5 schools in the North Eastern Victorian Region that have achieved consistent improvements in “Attitudes to Attendance”, “Effort”, and “Sense of Confidence” in Year 7 cohorts from 2017 to 2019.
• Forest Hill College has been identified as 1 of 2 schools in North Eastern Victorian Region who have improved across all 3 areas ( “Attitudes to Attendance”, “Effort”, and “Sense of Confidence”) and had an overall NAPLAN improvement from 2017 to 2019.
• Forest Hill College has been identified as 1 of 7 schools in North Eastern Victorian Region that have achieved consistent improvements in “Attitudes to Attendance”, “Effort”, and “Sense of Confidence” AND shown consistent improvement in NAPLAN reading from 2017 to 2019.
• Forest Hill College has been identified as one of nine schools in North Eastern Victorian Region with consistently high proportions of students demonstrating above benchmark growth in years 7 and 9 Numeracy in at least 4 of the last 5 years

 

We are justifiably very proud of this work, underpinned by a powerful commitment to Positive Education, developing great curriculum and developing teachers who deliver content in an engaging and inspiring manner.

 

Finally, the College was blessed to have the Chinese Cultural Centre of Victoria Lion Dance Troupe perform a ceremony designed to bring us good fortune in the year of the rat. Lunar New Year is a wonderful time to celebrate with family and for many of our Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese students and staff, we know some of you are a long way from home. For some of you this is very hard to do from afar. We celebrate with you, xīn nián kuài lè, Chúc Mừng Năm Mới, 새해 복 많이 받으세요,

Have a great weekend.

David Rogers – Principal