Dear St Thomas Aquinas community,

Thank you to Mrs Smith and staff and parents who supported our children to attend a number of Oz Tag Gala Days and the PSSA Track and Field last week. Such teamwork and generosity of spirit is what enables our children to attend these events. The students were fantastic representatives of St Thomas Aquinas with amazing team spirit.

Building on Excellent Practice

Last week, as part of our commitment to providing high quality learning for every student, we were visited by our coach for High Impact Teaching Practices. Toni observed and provided feedback for a number of teachers, modelled lessons and sat with the Executive staff to plan for future school development. Her feedback was excellent and I am excited about the future initiatives that will build on the excellent practice already at St Thomas Aquinas.

Relief and Split Classes

Over the course of the year we have had a number of questions about when we split classes, what the students do during this time and why we haven't placed a relief or student teacher in the classroom. Perfectly understandable. We all want the very best learning opportunities for our children and don't recall this happening much when we were at school.

There are many factors taken into account when deciding on the best options for a class when the teacher is away, including:

• any availability of extra teachers
• Library, Chinese and Arts lessons for the day
• which staff members can meet our legal duty of care for supervision (not all can)
• the needs of students in the class
• school and year level events happening that day

In short, it is quite a jigsaw puzzle every morning and managing the needs of the students and the workloads of staff is always our first priority.

Teacher Shortage

One significant issue contributing to the matter is the incredible teacher shortage across the country. I have never experienced anything like it in 35 years of teaching. There are no longer enough teachers available to fill positions, including relief teachers. Many schools, including us, have advertised jobs and had no applicants when once we were struggling to shortlist from a large pool. It has become such an issue in recent years that the Australian Government launched the National Teacher Workforce Action Plan in 2022 to help build the number of teachers. We have not yet experienced an improvement.

As a result, relief teachers are booked up weeks in advance for planned leave or professional learning. They also become subsumed into hard to fill short term contracts in schools. For a long time now there have been no relief teachers available in the ACT for that last minute call when a teacher calls in sick for the day.

What are we doing to minimise the impact? We work hard to attract and bolster our staffing, as far as possible, with additional staff who are committed to working at St Thomas Aquinas and willing to move into different classes each day. One benefit of this is that they know the school, the children and can maintain the programs that the teacher leaves for their class. Students also feel comfortable more with them.

Occasionally, due to a large number of unavoidable absences due to sickness, including when the additional staff are sick, we have no other option but to consider splitting a class across the remaining classes for the day. This meets our duty of care requirements for supervision of children.

Splitting Classes

When we absolutely have to split classes we try to make it is as smooth and meaningful as possible. We always:

• have a default list of who goes where and with whom so that we can match students to classes and teachers based on their needs and create as much predictability as possible
• ensure any Arts, Library and Chinese lessons go ahead for that class
• ensure any intervention programs provided for the children in the class go ahead
• continue to run important whole school programs, such as Spelling Mastery, by using Executive staff to step in for that time

For younger students teachers are asked to provide a booklet of tasks that are based on recent learning in the classroom. This means they can complete this as independently as possible and reinforces the teaching from previous weeks. If they are in similar year levels split students are given the option to join in some of the learning of the host class. Older students, who use Google Classroom, are provided with the opportunity to continue independent tasks they are currently completing in their own classes.

In the current climate we are committed to ensuring that every day our students are provided with quality teaching and learning opportunities with minimal disruption. Our staff do an amazing job in supporting all students across the school. They work hard to make sure that, if they are away, their class is supervised and engaged in meaningful work, and if they need to supervise other students, they help them feel welcome and supported.

Our amazing CSAs!

What is a CSA? It's short for Classroom Support Assistant. These are the fabulous

staff members who spend time every day with students in classrooms, small groups or as individuals, supporting them in their learning.

Our CSAs are usually people who are training to be teachers or have completed significant courses in Education Support at CIT. They learn about specific disabilities or how to implement our intervention programs. Most importantly they develop supportive relationships with students. They learn about what interests them, motivates them, their challenges and joys. They become a trusted adult at school who can both challenge and support students to grow. They are truly amazing and an essential component to living our vision to be an inclusive school.

If ever you have the opportunity to thank them. Please do.

50th Anniversary Celebration

Next week we are looking forward to celebrating our 50th Anniversary. We have invited past Principals and staff to attend and we are also expecting students from the past to walk through to share their memories. Wherever you can assist in attending or helping with the barbecue we would greatly appreciate your support. One of the greatest strengths we have as a commnunity is our welcoming spirit. Let's show that to our visitors.

Matthew Garton

Principal