Celebrating Our Progress: Insights from the 2025 MMG Survey

Dear Somerset Community

Welcome back to Term 4 and what a busy start it’s been as we’ve begun to celebrate the end of year successes of our students and support our Year 12s as they move toward the end of their Somerset journey.

As I have shared previously, we are so thankful to all parents who participated in the 2025 MMG Survey. Your strong response rate of 69% demonstrates a highly engaged and supportive College community and within the feedback there are areas to celebrate and there are also areas for growth.

Academic Programme Excellence

We are pleased that 80% of parents expressed satisfaction with our academic programme, which directly aligns with the MMG Database average for similar schools. The survey specifically highlights satisfaction with our academic standards and impressive ATAR results, demonstrating our commitment to strong educational outcomes. Our dedicated staff also reported high satisfaction with the academic programme in the stand-alone staff survey.

Outstanding Facilities and Resources

Our facilities and resources are highly regarded by both parents and staff. This consistently indicates a strong, well-maintained, and well-resourced physical learning environment that effectively supports both our students' education and extracurricular activities.

Commitment to a Safe and Caring Environment

Providing a safe and caring environment for students is explicitly identified as an area of high performance by our staff. This reflects a fundamental and positive aspect of the College's culture and operations, ensuring student wellbeing is prioritised within a supportive community.

As part of our commitment to continuous improvement, your valuable feedback also guides us in focusing on opportunities for further enhancement across key areas.

Enhancing Communication

While communication is a multifaceted area, the College is committed to further improving the clarity, consistency, and effectiveness of our communication channels with all stakeholders. Your feedback has provided specific insights, particularly regarding aspects of Schoolbox usability and Parent/Teacher Meetings, which we are actively reviewing. We are also focused on improving communication strategies between the College Leadership Team and staff to ensure seamless information flow across the College. I hope 2025 has been a year in which parents have already begun to see a focus and improvement in this area.

Strengthening Pastoral Care

Student wellbeing is paramount at Somerset College. Although rated highly by both parents and staff, scores for pastoral care are slightly below MMG benchmarks, with some feedback suggesting "too little emphasis." Again, I hope the work that both Ms Collie and the Junior school team are undertaking in consultation with the parents, along with the new pastoral care structure in the senior years, demonstrates our commitment to strengthening our pastoral care framework to ensure comprehensive support for every student, taking into account feedback on aspects of student behaviour and bullying, and ensuring a consistent and visible approach.

Christian Ministry

One aspect of our MMG survey was around Christian ministry and we had some varying feedback, from parents and staff wanting the College to give more attention to this area and some parents wanting us to provide less. It’s helpful to remind parents that the College was formed as an Independent School underpinned by Christian principles, or as we might say today, Christian values. What that means to me, as it did when I worked here over 20 years ago, is that we talk about the Christian message as a community and we use Christian values in the way we conduct ourselves. However, it doesn’t mean we don’t acknowledge, teach about and respect other faiths. As we move forward, I’m keen to explore this in ways that are true to our foundation, but respectful of the diverse community in which we now live.

Looking Forward

The College Leadership Team is carefully reviewing all feedback. We are developing priority actions to inform our strategic planning and ensure continuous improvement across all aspects of College life. I want to acknowledge there are a lot of rumours around the community about radical changes we are going to make moving forward and for those who read this article, please be assured they are exactly that. Rumours. If you feel there is some truth, I encourage you, like the students are doing, to simply ask, so I can clarify.

The team met this week to put some more ‘meat’ to our plan and I can assure our community that there will be elements of your feedback woven in to the re-thinking of our mission and vision statements as well our strategic priorities for the next 5 – 10 years. We are enthusiastic about the future, as the College continues to evolve and provide an exceptional educational experience, guided by the valuable insights of our community. Our hope is to share the plan with our community by the end of the term.

Thank you once again for your ongoing partnership and support in making Somerset College a leading educational institution.