School Renewal Action Plan - St Thomas More College

Wallis, Area Supervisor South – I thank you for your support this year and I ask that you thank the Executive
at BCE for their ongoing support of the College. We recognise that as a College we are part of a bigger story
in regard to the education of our students.
Finally I thank the staff. It has again been a year of hard work and many achievements. It has been a year
when we told you to try ‘Life’ and your response was that I need to get a better a ‘Life’. I am of course
talking about our new Learning Management System. The last three years has been an incredible story of
growth for the College. A story built around how we present and how we learn – To steal a quote from
Mark Twain - “You can never be overdressed or overeducated.” Enrolment numbers have increased from
450 to an estimated 630 in 2013, we have plans in at BCE for the construction of buildings which total over
7 million dollars in new facilities, we have put on 12 new subjects in the senior phase of learning; our cocurricular
programs have continued to grow in both number and quality. None of this could have been
achieved without a committed and passionate staff. So to all teachers and support staff I say a heartfelt
thank you.
Our journey of change has been significant. We sometimes forget what great work has been done. Marie
Curie -The first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize, in 1903, for Physics said that ‘One never notices what
has been done; one can only see what remains to be done’. So as I present the school report tonight I want
to review not only 2012 but also where the year sits in the context of our plans.
Our work has been considerable - I hear often that the school has changed and that there are great things
happening at the College. This is undoubtedly so, but in reflecting on our change it is also important that
we take the time to consider the purpose of the change and more significantly how does the change
improve what we do.
Over the last five years, our College, like all schools has experienced some of the most profound challenges
to education – The Australian Curriculum, the introduction of NAPLAN Testing , the preparation for the
move of Year 7 to Secondary, the Digital Revolution and the introduction of 1 to 1 laptop program - all well
intentioned changes to improve education. As an educator nothing drives me more than to see
improvements in teaching and learning. However, we must remember that ‘Change does not necessarily
assure progress, but progress requires change’. As a College we have responded to these external changes
along with attending to our own College goals. But our challenge as Catholic educators has been to ensure
that in the light of such change, that we remained true to the Catholic values that underpin our College –
Values such as inclusion and an opportunity for all. Values that have been part of Catholic education long
before we began printing Year 12 outcomes data or NAPLAN results in newspapers.
One of the most recognisable changes to schools has been the use of the management speak of the
corporate world. Don Watson in his book ‘ Bendable Learnings’ refers to this language as ‘edu-babble,’
Governments have re-imaged education through the filter of business management theories and brought
this edu-babble to schools.
We talk of schools in terms of ‘performance indicators’,’ ‘a school improvement agenda’, ‘outcomes’ being
‘client focussed’ and ‘accountable’. As a nation, like so many times in our short history, we have followed
the path of the education changes of the United States and England. Places where high stakes testing have
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