From the Principal - 5 February 2016

Dear Parents,

Welcome back to the 2016 school year. I trust you had a wonderful break and enjoyed having your children with you for the holiday period.

Our Year 12 results from 2015 were excellent. We had 2 students receive the highest possible result of an OP1 with both gaining scholarships to continue their education at University. With nearly 30% of students obtaining an OP1-5 and almost 60% achieving an OP1-10, we rank highly against other schools. Almost all of our students can access a preferred University placement which is a wonderful result for the 2015 students. I would like to acknowledge the efforts of the Senior Learning Community staff in ensuring that our students have transitioned to a successful future. Once again, we are excited by the quality of our student academic performance and will be focussing on improving these results further in the future.

As you will probably realise, there have been some significant changes to the school for 2016 and we have also started our major building program. We have a current enrolment of 1180 students which is the largest in the history of Hillcrest. This is about 150 more than the same time last year, plus we also have an additional 60 kindergarten children on site. We are excited that so many families are selecting Hillcrest for their schooling experience and remain committed to building a school of exceptional quality in all areas of performance.

We have an additional 20 new staff at Hillcrest this year, all required due to the incredible increase in student numbers. This was the reason that we decided to run O-Day. I would like to thank the staff and community for their efforts in ensuring that this day was an incredible success. It is fair to say that this event was far more popular than we had expected and feedback from the parent community was overwhelmingly positive. I trust that all staff and students took the time to familiarise themselves with their new teachers and classrooms on this day. As a school we certainly noted the incredible smooth start to the year from day one. O-Day will now be a fixture on our annual calendar from now on, with each year building on the previous year as we learn from experience and community feedback.

The perennial issue of parking has become even more complicated this year. With a large section of the school closed due to the building program, we have asked the staff at Hillcrest to park offsite and be bussed to the school. This has cleared many car parks at the front of the school. The MPH car parks have been allocated to the Kindy and Prep parents, however at peak times, these parents will overflow from these areas until our new carparks are opened. Additional car parking spaces are part of the new building works with another 60-70 car spaces set to be established as part of the new Prep facilities. We are continuing to look at improvement measures we can make to the pickup and drop off areas, however we are very happy to discuss your ideas of how this can be improved.

Throughout this year you will see staff beginning to use our new pedagogical teaching framework that has been developed by Vince Wakefield and a group of teachers. I am thrilled with the effort this team has made and the end product is exceptional in every way. The implementation of this framework will see an alignment of teaching practice across this school which will benefit all of our students. You will also see some intentional use of data gathering and analysis in classrooms to better follow and report on student progress. This change will transform our school but will not be evident from a daily perspective as we gradually implement different components. We will keep you updated on the progress of this implementation throughout the year. In the meantime, please look out for the posters that will be in every room describing our new framework.

In any period of growth there will be growing pains and we are certainly experiencing some of these at this point of time. Please address any major concerns with your relevant Head of Learning Community, but also I ask for grace and patience as we establish our building program and continue to build an excellent school that will meet the needs of all our students.

Blessings,

Jeff Davis
PRINCIPAL