Principal's Address
Thank you for your patience and assistance in reorienting students back into school mode during these first few disrupted weeks. Despite the challenges, our school community has continued to thrive, packing a week's worth of events into shortened weeks. I am truly impressed with how our staff and students have coped.
The 2025 school formal was a wonderful and successful event, despite a minor hiccup with the lighting in the car park. This event marks the first of many rites of passage for our Year 12 students. In my speech to the Year 12s, I referenced one of my favourite psychologists and authors, Steve Biddulph. Steve emphasises the importance of rites of passage, as everyone needs moments that acknowledge growth and change on their journey from youth to adulthood.
Throughout history and across cultures, these rites have taken various forms. For example, the ancient Spartans put their young men through the Krypteia, where boys were given a knife and sent to hunt a fierce enemy or wolf. In parts of Africa, young men and women are pierced and scarred to mark the transition. While we won't be sending our Year 12s to take down a pig or get inked, our milestones—such as the Year 12 Emmaus retreat, graduation ceremony, and dinner—serve as our gentle yet vital way of saying, "You’re ready." Without such markers, Steve warns that young people can drift into prolonged adolescence, potentially resulting in your thirty-five-year-old son or daughter still living at home, expecting their dinner cooked and washing done. That’s not the future any of us wants.
We look forward to continuing to walk through these rites with our Year 12s in their final year of schooling.
MTSS Update
As discussed in previous newsletters, our primary professional development focus for staff in the coming years will be MTSS (Multi-Tiered Systems of Support). The MTSS committee has been formed at school, and we are beginning to upskill our staff in research-backed, effective, and least-intrusive strategies that help improve both observable and internal student engagement. As stakeholders in our students' education, it is important that we have a clear understanding of these aspects of student engagement. I found the following diagram exceptionally useful in illustrating what we aim to improve. Staff are learning specific strategies to reach students experiencing difficulty in maintaining engagement in one or more of the quadrants.
SRIP
St John’s School is scheduled for a School Renewal and Improvement quadrennial school review from Monday, 2 June 2025 to Thursday, 5 June 2025. The Toowoomba Catholic Schools Office has a School Renewal and Improvement framework in place, which includes a quadrennial school review. In this review, a panel consisting of senior staff from the Toowoomba Catholic Schools (TCS) Teaching and Learning Directorate and a peer principal from another school in the Diocese will visit the school for three days.
Through a process of appreciative inquiry, panel members will interview staff, parents/carers, students, and community members. They will ask, “In your opinion, what is going well at the school?” and “What could be done better?” The purpose is for the panel to report its findings to the school community and suggest improvement strategies. These will inform the process of strategic plan development and the annual action plans, which are also linked to the TCS Strategic Plan.
The aim is to assist schools in strategically planning to improve teaching and learning, and these reviews occur in all TCS schools. The review team would like to hear from the school community, and I encourage anyone interested to have their say. Your feedback is important and will help us continue to achieve the two pillars of TCS: that all students will come to personally know Jesus and that all students will achieve academic success.
Feedback can be provided to the review panel in person or by telephone. All feedback remains confidential. Please register your interest in being part of this process by completing this form or scanning the QR code below. A member of the administration team will then contact you to determine a time for your interview closer to the review date.
Cheers,
Mark