Blair Dravitski

But we're confident in the way we deliver curriculum.

And so trying to explain that to parents, not just our ESL parents, but across the board.

The other process is that all of my senior leadership team have business cards with their email address on.

If they have concerns, confusion, misunderstanding, then they're encouraged to send an email once they get home.

Because often in the excitement of transition to school or enrolment, they don't always remember everything they want to ask.

And so those just, I guess, provide a platform to connect with.

In regards to the language barrier, we're always very much promoting speaking their home language at home.

Initially it was more from a pastoral lens, because a lot of our families move from overseas without any other family.

So being able to connect with extended family back in their home countries, the children having that language is vitally important for that being successful.

And then the research would suggest that from a cognitive and academic point of view, that having two languages, being able to speak two languages is important.

Yeah.

Absolutely, 100%.

Yeah, so with the rapid growth, five years ago we started our structured literacy journey.

And it was more so because I was looking for something, professional learning, that no one had done before, in our school anyway, to create the importance of being a school.

So whether you were teaching year ones or year eights, the same professional language was being spoken about in the staff room, same professional language was spoken about online.

staff meetings and so therefore that was the intent.

The content initially was just something we weren't familiar with but we learnt very quickly that actually it had a place and it had a purpose and we found it engaging for our families and engaging for the kids that we were working with.

Now we

reviewed this journey because we thought oh actually we're doing really well in this space and after review there was some you know with rapid growth there's always some I guess gaps as you as you progress through and so constant review and constant feedback is important and so the last couple of years we've made some additional changes to ensure that we are doing it well and

We've taken opportunities where available to ensure that my staff are well equipped with the skills, regular observations, and we have seen a positive improvement in literacy across the school as a result.