Assistant Principal
Friday Assembly - Achievements
At St Francis of Assisi, we celebrate our student achievements in faith, learning and well-being each Friday with a whole school assembly. Sometimes we may have assemblies on other days due to other events on the calendar.
As part of this, we would like to acknowledge any significant achievements that our students complete outside of school. To streamline this process, we have created a form to complete if you would like to share your child's achievements. This will allow you to add relevant details, and photos if you like, to support us in presenting this information accurately.
Please complete this form (link below) if you would like us to recognise your child's achievement at our Friday assembly. This could be a sporting achievement, dancing/singing/performing achievement, martial arts, etc. Anything that your child has achieved outside of school. We would love to share the good news stories of our students.
NOTE: All forms completed by the Monday of the week of the Friday assembly will be included. Any forms received after that will be included in the following assembly.
In addition to our weekly assemblies, we also hold Celebration of Learning Assemblies - 1 per class each year. These assemblies allow each class to present highlights of their learning to the whole school, and we also present Principal and Value awards. Please see below for the 2025 Celebration of Learning timetable.
PLEASE NOTE: Celebration of Learning Assemblies begin at the earlier time of 2:10pm.
2025 Celebration of Learning Timetable
Assembly starts 2:10 pm
| Term/Week | Date | Class |
| Term 1 Week 10 | Friday 4 April | 4 Blue |
| Term 2 Week 5 |
Friday 30 May | 3 Gold |
| Term 2 Week 9 | Friday 27 June | 1 Gold |
| Term 3 Week 4 |
Friday 15 August | 2 Blue |
| Term 3 Week 8 | Friday 12 September | K Blue |
| Term 4 Week 5 |
Friday 14 November | 6 Blue |
| Term 4 Week 9 | Friday 12 December |
Principal and Value Awards Only |
Term 1 Assembly Dates and Times
Please see the table below for the Assembly Dates and times. These can also be found on the calendar available on Compass. Parents/Carers of students receiving awards will be notified if their child is receiving an award each week.
| Week | Date | Time |
| 6 | Friday 7 March | 2:20 pm |
| 7 | Friday 14 March | 8:45 am |
| 8 | Friday 21 March | 8:45 am |
| 9 | Thursday 27 March | 8:45 am |
| 10 | Friday 4 April - 4 Blue Celebration of Learning | 2:10 pm |
| 11 | Friday 11 April | 8:45 am |
NAPLAN 2025
Year 3 and Year 5 will begin the NAPLAN assessments next week. The test window runs from Wednesday 12 March to Monday 24 March. Parents do not need to do anything additional to prepare for these assessments.
Stage Leaders 2025
For any issues regarding your child that can not be handled by contacting the class teacher, please contact the relevant stage leaders below.
Early Stage 1 / Stage 1 (K-2) - Ms Maloney
Stage 2 (Year 3 and 4) - Mr Murphy
Stage 3 (Year 5 and 6) - Mr Smith
Homework Policy
Thank you to those parents who provided feedback on our homework survey (we had a wonderful 43 responses!). We will now finalise the policy for implementation. In the meantime, our homework expectations will be that every student reads each day.
Some of the key results from the survey are below (% of respondents) :
- 86% said amount of homework was just right or too little
- 93% said students need some or a lot of assistance with homework
- 84% were confident in helping their children with homework
- 67% said that homework does or sometimes does impact on family time
Only 2 respondents out of 43 said homework had not benefitted their child’s learning.
Some recurring comments were around:
• requesting homework to be due after weekends so they have time to complete it during the weekend, with busy afternoon schedules, etc.
• requesting more targeted homework support to support individual needs
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or feedback on homework.
Pivot 2025
We are excited to announce that in 2025 we will again be partnering with Pivot, an online tool to support student learning and wellbeing for all students K-6. Pivot involves a series of check-ins which provide important data for our staff to identify student needs and follow up as appropriate. Please see the guide below for further information.
Pivot Baseline Surveys were recently completed, and the weekly check-ins have now begun. For those interested, please see some of the key data from our baseline survey see below.
- Of the three domains (Resilience, Belonging and Safety) - Safety recorded the highest responses
- Highest scoring questions indicated that students identified their school as a safe place and have friends they can trust
- Boys resulted in higher levels of responses to questions about wellbeing
Staff will use this important data to identify areas in which we can better support students to be safe and happy at our school.
If you have any concerns about your child using the Pivot tool, or have any questions, please contact me to discuss.
Healthy Harold
This week we have been fortunate to have the Life Education Van and Healthy Harold at our school. Every class has had a visit to the van and the opportunity to meet Harold. This is always an exciting experience, and a great way to learn in a different way. All classes experienced different modules (see below), which were chosen to support their needs at this time.
Kindergarten - Harold's Friend Ship
Year 1 - Ready, Steady, Go
Year 2 - Harold's Online World
Year 3 - bCyberwise
Year 4 - Friends and Feelings
Year 5 - Relate, Respect, Connect
Year 6 - Decisions
Thanks, Harold, and educator Emily, for visiting us!
St Clare of Assisi Awards
Please be reminded that these awards started in 2024. Any Merit, RE or PB4L awards achieved from this time on will count towards the St Clare of Assisi merit awards (but can only be used once).
Process:
5 x Class Awards (Merit, RE or PB4L) = St Clare of Assisi Award - please bring the 5 awards into the school office. These will be recorded and a St Clare of Assisi Merit Award will be presented at the next assembly.
3 x St Clare of Assisi Awards = 1 St Francis Medallion
Please let me know if you have any questions about the awards system.
Mr Brett Murphy
Assistant Principal