School adopts web software for administrative efficiency

Pretty Beach Public School has adopted web-based software to streamline the school's administration, starting this term.

Principal Ms Karen Wardlaw said: "There will be changes to the way we do simple things such as mark rolls and respond to attendance issues.

"It will have a significant effect on how we centrally store, access and evaluate student data and the way we monitor student well-being.

"There will be changes to assessment and reporting processes as well as how we communicate with parents.

"As each of these individual changes to processes are implemented, we will be letting our parents know so that we all feel comfortable and confident with new, streamlined practices," Ms Wardlaw said.

"Another big change, linked to the introduction of the Sentral software, relates to our school Learning Support Team and related systems of support for meeting the individual needs of all our learners.

"Strong learning support processes need to start with early and systematic collection of relevant student data so that we can identify and support individual student needs as early as possible.

"Of course, strong Learning Support Team processes will also support our 'at stage' and 'high potential' learners so that they, too, are meeting or exceeding expected growth.

"This year we will be also developing new systems of support across the school to make it easier to collect and evaluate student wellbeing data.

"Our goal is to ensure that students who are at risk of social or intellectual disengagement from school are identified as soon as possible and supported with individualised plans to increase engagement at school.

"As we embed these new systems, there will be increased communication with parents.

"We also endeavour to have parents more effectively contributing to the development of individual student learning plans or wellbeing plans," Ms Wardlaw said.

"Along with these new systems of support, our teaching team are currently working on a process of shifting from using classroom peg charts to visual support strategies associated with the Zones of Regulation.

"The Zones of Regulation allow students to use a shared language to categorise complex feelings in a simple and non-judgemental way and allows teachers to support students to recognise not only how they are feeling but how they can 'get back in the zone'.

"As our students learn about the learning zone and how they can use simple strategies to self regulate their own behaviour, our parents will be hopefully learning with us, too.

"We will be sharing our Zones of Regulation lessons online so that parents can be involved, learn with us and use the associated language.

"We hope that families, too, will benefit from these positive strategies at home as well as at school," Ms Wardlaw said.

SOURCE:

Newsletter, 24 Feb 2020

Karen Wardlaw, Pretty Beach Public School