Dear Parents and Carers,

HOPE and the Purpose of Catholic schools and Catholic Education

On Wednesday Evening the St Patrick’s staff participated in faith formation twilight professional learning with Prof Br David Hall. The theme of the evening was on HOPE. This reflection was most powerful and speaks to the heart of the Catholic school and our teachers:

Supporting students to be St Pat’s Kids.

It is important to recognise and acknowledge the many students (usually 95% of the population) who are showing us daily that they know and can follow our three school rules:

Thank you to the many students who not only follow the rules but who lead the rules by their exemplary behaviours for learning and engaging in the life of their classroom and our school.

This week the Leadership Team and I have invested time in speaking with both CE staff and external experts regarding school wide positive behaviour and strategies to engage all students in learning. At St Pat’s there continue to be 5% of students each day who are not showing behaviours for learning and are not fully following the school rules. We know that the function of children’s behaviour is often to communicate their unmet needs. One way to understand behaviour is to look at what the child is trying to access or avoid: adult attention, peer attention, tangibles.

Sometimes students with unmet needs experience very heightened emotions, they may use a physical action when they are angry/upset, they may use aggressive language, they may withdraw. Of course there are many other ways children behave to communicate their needs are not being met.

Today we have a CE team working with staff on supporting students with a variety of learning and engagement needs. Next Monday we have other team members coming to school to focus on strategies to help all students engage in class and community, and most importantly fully participate in learning.

The Leadership Team are considering the next steps to support all students to engage fully including: visits from other experts, coaching, and further defining and clarifying the boundaries for these students. You can expect to hear more about this in coming weeks with a plan being shaped for 2021.

We continue to support students to make strong choices at school and we are looking forward to the opportunity to recognise positive behaviour for learning at our Tathra days in Week 6 of term.

School Concert DVD

We hope your family was able to find a DVD player and enjoy the school concert. If you wanted to send in a message of thanks to Ross Mannell who gifts his time and talent every year to create this memory please email or send a note – we will pass them on to Ross.

Blessings,

Jo