Transcript
Thank you for a wonderful year Carey community. It's been great for us to reconnect over the course of the centenary and our thanks goes out to all of our sponsors and volunteers and parents who have really engaged in what has been a massive series of wonderful events which have reached into all parts of our community and really has been a wonderful celebration for us over the course of 2023.
Watch our centenary highlights reel
I'm particularly pleased with the strengthening of the learning culture that's taken place across this year and the level at which our students have been taking advantage of all the learning opportunities across all year levels in the programs.
We've seen a real effort from our innovation team to bring forward some real advancements through our assessment framework at the School and also some really important work with the new metrics partnership with the University of Melbourne which has seen this year the first steps in us trialling a small group of students to have a learner profile as they graduate from the School.
So it very much is fulfilling that ambition of ours to have ATAR plus, a really excellent ATAR score, but also being able to say so much more about the capabilities of our students as they graduate from the Carey experience.
That's really starting to reflect too with an increased number of students from Carey getting early offers from universities which really speaks to our ability to tell that story for students as they're graduating and unis are picking up Carey graduates, keen to have them come into their programs as well.
We're looking forward to being able to share with you in early January the results for the Class of 2023. This year we will be launching results for VCE and IB together, around about the 3rd of January (2024).*
A letter will come out to you celebrating those achievements at that time. In the newsletter too, I would refer you to a list of those students who have done remarkable things in their academic learning program and that's a real celebration of achievement for us over the course of this year.
Read more about some recent student achievements
Next year too we roll out our new [Middle and Senior School] timetable, which moves us into periods of 75 minutes. We're really excited about this, it'll slow the pace of the School down and allow a greater sense of flow in our classrooms. The ability for students to really consolidate learning in class with the support of their teachers and be processing a little less of an evening, around having six lots of information to sort through and reflect on over a night time, it'll be now four.
And just moving [1500 Middle and Senior School] students around the campus only four times of the day rather than six, we think will really benefit the learning program and give our students and our teachers a chance to really focus in on targeting the learning to meet individual learning needs of our students and really finding ways to extend them.
This year too we've embarked upon a really major upgrade of our ICT infrastructure. The focus in 2023 has been around improving our cyber safety and also our data security and that will continue into next year.
We note though that we have some work to do in terms of our communications ability with you and you receive information from a whole lot of sources. We are going to do some work on that next year to really try and refine the way we're sending our messaging out to you, the use of Canvas and the like to be able to try and streamline some of those processes for you.
We hear that concern and are very much going to turn our heads to that amongst other innovations in technology which we hope will bring some greater efficiency across our School and also some opportunities to really use tech to advance the learning program for us as well.
Thank you all very much for choosing Carey. We've really enjoyed our opportunities to work with your children this year. My personal thanks to the incredible work of all of our staff team right across the School who facilitate the learning and provide all the professional support functions of our School.
We are well set for a great year ahead in 2024. I want to take this opportunity to wish you all a wonderfully restful break. I certainly am looking forward to some 'R and R' down at the beach at Port Fairy, a chance to get in the ocean and do some personal refreshment.
And then looking forward to having you all back in the new year. A Merry Christmas to you all.
Jonathan Walter
Principal
* The combined VCE and IB results of our Class of 2023 will be released to our community on Thursday 4 January 2024 – keep an eye on our Instagram, Facebook and website!
