This week I have had the honour of representing Western Australian Catholic Principals at the Australian Primary Principals national conference in Adelaide with over 400 fellow primary school leaders from across Australia. 

The messages across the three days have been about many different areas but the two that have resonated with me have been around student engagement and student need.

The resources currently available around mental health and first aid with Be You, the new amalgamation of several previous child and adult based organisations such as KidsMatters and MidMatters. Be You is a national mental health initiative for educators which aims to promote and protect positive mental health in children and young people in every early learning service and school in Australia. Although the service is targeted at educators and schools there are some great resources for parents at the family site at https://healthyfamilies.beyondblue.org.au that are worth looking through. 

During 2019 we have been without a parent group to support the extra curriculum activities outside the normal school scope. There have been a number of reasons for this and as a school, we have looked at how we can provide a platform for all of our community members to become a part of something that both meets the need of our school community and also our parents and guardians at this current time in our school.

Further, in the newsletter, you will find an invite outlining the next steps that we are taking in reimagine the parent connection within our school. We are excited about what the future holds, especially after the amazing parent organised Father’s Day Breakfast organised by Libby De Masi and the Year 4 parents. A very big thank you to those parents who put on such a great day and to all the sponsors that donated items for either the meal or the prizes for the raffle. A more detailed list is included further in the newsletter.

Ursula Frayne

Last week staff followed in the footsteps of the very first Mercy nuns who began the formalised catholic education in Perth 173 years ago.

St Kieran was also founded by the Mercy order 99 years ago and as part of the preparation for our centenary celebration, our staff completed a pilgrimage of Ursula Frayne, one of the first Mercy sisters to arrive in Australia and whose name is memorialised by the k-12 school in Victoria Park of the same name.

Although the Mercy order has few direct connections with our school at the moment, although Sr Elizabeth and Sr Claire are still an important part of our school, it is vital for us as we move forward, understand the tremendous sacrifice and input that was made for our school by the order and how, not only in our centenary year but also beyond, that we both acknowledge and help this history anchor our school to the direction that we will undertake into the future.

This is one of our key drivers taken from our cyclic review and one we will continue to explore with staff, students and our wider community as we use where we have come from to help us work out us to what we need to become next.