St Mary's College Ipswich

College Achievements 2019

Enhancing Catholic IdentityEnhancing Catholic Identity in our College has been a key goal this year. In 2018 we surveyed our students, staff and parents about how we felt about the school’s Catholicity and to envisage our ideal school. Whilst we appreciate our Catholic traditions, we must now look to re-contextualise it, or re-image it, to fit a more contemporary world. This will be long term project; one which will need to engage all our stakeholders and the community. The first steps have been taken with staff invited to form a team to lead the project. They have already undergone formation and have come up with a range of suggestions for enhancing the Catholic identity of our school. We look forward to seeing these develop into goals for 2020.

Relationship and Sexuality EducationAs part of the ACARA Health and Physical Education (HPE) curriculum, all Australian secondary schools are required to teach units on Relationships and Sexuality Education. At St Mary’s, it is important that these potentially sensitive topics are delivered in a way that acknowledges and respects our Catholic identity and beliefs. The HPE teachers have embedded a Catholic perspective in all of their units, just like the teachers in each Key Learning Area within the school. In 2020, more information will be made available for parents through the Curriculum tab on the College website and a parent information session to be held in Term Two.

St Mary's College Ipswich | An inclusive Catholic School for girls in the Mercy tradition

Mrs Judith Finan | Principal

St Mary's College Ipswich

Learning and Teaching GoalsUnder our Excellent Learning and Teaching goals this year we have aimed for all our students to improve their capacity to write and to focus on student engagement, particularly around attendance. Improving writing competence across all year levels was our key goal, specifically developing student skills in sentence structure and punctuation. Our teaching staff have undertaken considerable professional development to support student confidence to write sentences and in using a range of sentence types. Many strategies have been used this year to support writing including regular sustained silent writing. We have collected student samples of writing, marked these against criteria and can determine a growth in their writing skills and this is promising for ongoing work in 2020.

Engagement in LearningIn terms of engagement in learning, we have focused on encouraging and promoting the value of regular attendance. Brisbane Catholic Education launched their “Engage Strategy” to support and guide schools in make this a key priority this year and ongoing. Whilst we have seen a growth in our attendance rates we are still below the expected rate of 90% of students attending 90% of the time. Our Pastoral Care teachers and leaders are working with students to support their engagement through sharing their individual attendance rates and providing support for families. Next year we aim to continue to work with our community to ensure that the message of ‘every day matters’ becomes our mantra.

Queensland Certificate of EducationOur biggest undertaking during 2019 has been the implementation of the new Queensland Certificate of Education syllabus and with it the new ATAR system. We will look back on 2019 as being a challenging year for both staff and students as they embrace a completely new system. I cannot speak highly enough of our teaching staff for the committed work undertaken to prepare for this year and to then develop their teaching program, and assessment items which meet the demands of the new courses. This has been a mammoth undertaking. You can be assured as parents that our students are being delivered a full complement of programs, set to external standards by the Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority.

St Mary's College Ipswich | An inclusive Catholic School for girls in the Mercy tradition

St Mary's College Ipswich

Gateway to Industry Schools ProgramAn exciting outcome this year, and one which sits well with our goal to enhance learning opportunities for our students, is our acceptance into the Gateway to Industry Schools program – Aerospace industries. We are the only all-girls school in this program to date and already we are seeing industry partners seek us out so that we can form positive relationships which will mean great opportunities for our students. I want to acknowledge our partnership agreement with the University of Southern Queensland.

I am proud to acknowledge, and share with our community, ourachievements for 2019 and look forward to new challenges and new

opportunities for our students in 2020.

St Mary's College Ipswich | An inclusive Catholic School for girls in the Mercy tradition