Dear Parents and Carers,

Our full return to school life has continued to progress relatively smoothly. The students have settled back in remarkably well and teachers are loving having them back. While the routine is not completely normal with no assemblies or large gatherings, everyone is doing well.

Thank you again for your patience and understanding.

Changes to End of Semester Reports
The time of remote learning brought an opportunity to learn many new technological and independent learning skills we are all looking forward to continuing to develop. It also brought some challenges, including in the area of reporting on student achievement for Semester 1.

Some of the implications include that:

• not every student had the same opportunity and resources to fully engage in the remote learning programme equally, hence it is difficult to use many of the tasks from the program for assessment;
• not all of the intended curriculum for the end of Term 1 and beginning of Term 2 could be quickly translated into an online environment, hence the curriculum plan that was initially intended for the Semester needed to be changed and so not all curriculum areas will be covered enough to assess;

So Catholic Education have changed their systemic approach for reporting on student progress this Semester. To reflect the learning that has taken place this Semester you can expect the following.

1. The Semester report will still look the same as previous years (this is a system decision and not a school based one). Each curriculum area will be on the report as per usual.
2. English, Mathematics and RE will all be reported on. Reporting on the remaining curriculum areas will be based on the curriculum covered in the conceptual inquiry units taught during face-to-face teaching weeks. This will impact on Health, Science, History, Geography, Physical Education, etc. Teachers will only assess in these areas when sufficient content has been taught to assess students' understandings and skills.
3. There will be no large general comment. This will mean that teachers will not have to provide drafts of their reports to the Executive Team as early as usual and can spend more time face-to-face teaching and then assessing.
4. All students who have Personal Plans will receive an additional Personal Plan report to comment about their achievement against their Personal Plan goals (did you know we have 34 students on Personal Plans in our school? We have an amazing team that supports their learning).

These reports will be sent home Friday of week 9 of school this term. Optional Parent Teacher interviews will be available to parents in week 10.

Thank you for always working together to achieve as much as we do.

Sabbath Week
Next week is Sabbath Week. It is typically Week 7 each term and is a week to pause, rest and be present to each day. The Sabbath is a traditionally Jewish custom where one day in seven was devoted to rest and worship. Many other cultures have similar cultural observances.

At St Benedict’s the Sabbath Week is specifically timed when energy levels begin to dip during the term giving us a small pause before completing the final weeks of the term. We do not send homework during that week so as to provide families with a little respite from very busy home routines. We always encourage reading as a pleasurable activity so we provide readers for our younger students, not referring to this as homework.

I hope all families enjoy a restful long weekend.

God bless.

 
Rachel Smith
Principal