Principal's Log

As a community we congratulate our Director of Staff, Mrs Tanya Crooks, on her appointment as Principal of Redeemer Lutheran College Brisbane, from the start of next year. This appointment reflects Mrs Crooks breadth of experience and passion for growing young people within a Christian community in a rich and dynamic way. We will formally acknowledge Mrs Crooks’ contribution towards the end of the year and our thoughts and prayers are with her as she makes this transition. As a community, we can also celebrate that the people and rich learning culture of Pacific has supported the growth of our fourth Principal. The process of appointing our next Director of Staff has commenced this week.

Our Year 12 students were very focused in their approach to the QCS Test this week. Their good-natured support of each other was evident over the two days. We thank Ms Sue Arahill for the leadership of the QCS days and training, and Miss Kim Stone, Mrs Rae Hall and Miss Rebecca Ross for their preparation of the students over the course of this year.

In an exciting change for next year we are going to be providing an increased range of subject offerings for Year 9 students from 2017. The choice of electives will enable students to go into more depth as they pursue areas of interest and strength for a semester or a year. The new offerings include Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics 1 (STEM 1 and STEM 2), Philosophy and Reasoning, Manufacturing Studies, Dance, Business Economics and Media Studies. I encourage families to gain a fuller appreciation of the richness of the course offerings by accessing the Year 9 subject selection booklet on our website via the following link: http://pacificlutheran.qld.edu.au/learning-journey/subject-offerings.

Families will receive their individual student reports for NAPLAN over the coming week. Once again, there were individual students and cohorts that performed extremely well. At this time there are changes to results being made as schools discover errors of process. The results of two of our students at Year 3 and Year 5 have been corrected and this will change means for these cohorts across two dimensions of the test. We have been advised that changes to the cohort data will be made available in October and we will make broader comment about Year 3 and 5 cohorts once the corrected data is available. All cohorts performed well on reading and numeracy, with the Year 7 group performing well above national means in all areas and the Year 9 group at or above national means for all areas. With the release of data in July, teachers have been analysing it on an individual and cohort basis and implementing strategies to improve student learning. As a College we continue to have a focus on further improving spelling and writing skills.

We thank God for the many people within our community who have rich hearts filled with belongingness that provide safe and rich places for people to grow. We thank God for His unconditional love for us and pray that this might enrich our hearts to be generous in our connections.

Dr Bronwyn Dolling, Principal