Like many organisations we are people-centred, and our staff are our greatest asset! This means that our largest cost base is also our staff. As part of our next Strategic Plan, we established a priority around the professional growth, coaching and development of our staff as crucial to Somerset’s continued success. I thought it might be helpful for our community to be aware that as a College we invest in our staff in many ways, with the express purpose of ensuring this impacts what is happening in our classrooms and in our co-curricular activities.
In our Junior School, parents will be aware we have employed a Numeracy Coach, Ms Jaki Kontoleon, and she is working hard to review numeracy in the the classrooms. Using a raft of different data measures, we are looking to support our Junior School teachers in upskilling them in different aspects of teaching numeracy and ensuring we have consistency across Year Levels. At the same time, we have a renewed focus on the implementation of Initial Lit, an evidence-based whole-class Literacy programme providing all children with the essential core knowledge and strong foundations to become successful readers and writers. With a renewed focus on our teaching and learning in the Early Years, these programmes not only help develop the capabilities of our staff, but ensure we provide our students with the strongest of foundations for ongoing success.
In the Senior School, we are investing in several different research projects in Years 7 to 9, with a focus on reading in Year 8, Mathematics in Years 7 and 9 and Critical Thinking in Year 9. At the same time, I am keen to see our staff engage with other institutions across the country who may be leaders in a particular field and to understand ‘what is best practice in that area’ and how that can inform what we do here at Somerset.
As parents will be aware, the implementation of an AI framework is a key focus of the College in the coming months. For me, this is not so much about how we use AI, but more importantly, what impact it has on the way students are going to learn. We can use AI as a portal for gaining information, but if the aim is to fully embrace the potential, we need to explore how students will co-author, how they will use those human skills to understand and discern what they can gain from AI. This is an exciting journey that we intend to commence next term.
Our staff are committed to ongoing learning and development and for me, this is such an important part of a school which values their staff, ultimately benefitting all our students and the wider College community.
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