School Prorities

We know we’ve done our job when our kids skip to school

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Mount Hawthorn is a distinctive school offering a broad range of high quality, specialist programs that provide choice and opportunities for our students to flourish. We recognise and nurture individual strengths, both academic and non-academic, and celebrate diversity, giving each student a solid platform from which they can shine.

Our focus is to develop the whole child by providing a safe, healthy, engaging, supportive and challenging learning environment. This is achieved with the support of caring, qualified staff , effective leadership and an engaged parent body. As the hub of our community, we strive to reflect its values through our virtues program and ensure our students feel connected to their school and the broader community.

Mount Hawthorn Primary School students graduate as well-rounded individuals: confident, independent, respectful, academically capable, socially aware, community minded and emotionally resilient, ready and eager to take their place in society as life-long learners.

Our Priorities

Success for all students

We believe that every student at our school is capable of successful learning and our overarching aim is to ensure that this happens. Building and maintaining positive and caring relationships between staff, students and parents is vital to maximising student potential.

Our school values a team approach to learning and relies on partnerships between staff, students and parents to promote student learning and well-being. Our school strives to create a learning environment that promotes intellectual rigour and which is safe, respectful, tolerant and inclusive. At our school, we have a coherent, sequenced plan for curriculum delivery from Kindergarten to Year 6.

Our processes to monitor student progress are clear and evidence-based. We communicate our learning plans and our assessment tools to parents and families in different ways to ensure that there is a clear understanding of what students are learning and how they are progressing within the framework of the Australian Curriculum and Early Years Learning Framework.

Distinctive School

We are a distinctive school because of our commitment to our community. The school actively seeks ways to enhance student learning and well-being by partnering with parents and families, other education and training institutions, local businesses and community organisations.

Parents and families are recognised as integral members of the school community and partners in their children’s education. Partnerships are strategically established to address identified student needs and operate by providing access to experiences, support and intellectual and/or physical resources not available within the school. All partners are committed to the common purposes and goals of partnership activities.

Procedures are in place to ensure effective communications and to monitor and evaluate the intended impacts of the school’s partnerships.

High Quality Teaching & Leadership

Our school has found ways to build a school-wide, professional team of highly able teachers and education assistants who take an active leadership role beyond the classroom. Strong procedures are in place to encourage a school-wide, shared responsibility for student learning and success, and to encourage the development of a culture of continuous professional improvement that includes classroom-based learning, mentoring and coaching arrangements.

The principal and other school leaders recognise that highly effective teaching is the key to improving student learning throughout the school. They take a strong leadership role, encouraging the use of research-based teaching practices in all classrooms to ensure that every student is engaged, challenged and learning successfully. All teachers understand and use effective teaching methods, including explicit instruction to maximise student learning.

A Capable & Responsive Organisation

The school leadership team has established and is driving a strong improvement agenda for the school, grounded in evidence from research and practice and expressed in terms of improvements in measurable student outcomes. Explicit and clear school-wide targets for improvement have been set and communicated to the School Board, parents and families, teachers and students, with accompanying timelines.

Our school applies its resources (staff time, expertise, funds, facilities, materials) in a targeted manner to meet the learning and well-being needs of all students. It has school-wide policies, practices and programs in place to assist in identifying and addressing student needs. Flexible structures and processes enable the school to respond appropriately to the needs of individual learners.

Beliefs & Values

Mount Hawthorn’s Virtues and Values program is incorporated into every part of our school life, teaching children how to develop a solid foundation for the rest of their lives.

The Virtues Program teaches the school community about good characteristics that make a person, for example ‘confidence’. The values program teaches the community how to take those good characteristics and turn them into a positive way of living life and treating others. With ‘confidence’, the children are given many opportunities to demonstrate that virtue such as with assemblies, speaking competitions and many leadership programs. Mount Hawthorn’s Virtues and Values program is incorporated into every part of our school life, teaching children how to develop a solid foundation for the rest of their lives.

The buddy program is an excellent way for older primary children to teach, help, listen to and play with a younger child in the school. It helps to develop a strong and positive relationship between children. The children at Mount Hawthorn love ‘buddy’ class activities because they all feel a sense of ‘belonging’ and this makes them feel safe.

The school leadership team has so many opportunities to develop many virtues of character such as responsibility and confidence. There is a waste wise team, the sports captains, the virtues leaders and the school councillors just to name a few.

The school models good behaviour which teaches the children how to behave in all aspects of life, whether it be in the classroom, playground, at sporting events or even excursions.

The virtues and values program is incredibly important because it encourages children to find all those positive characteristics inside of them and display them to the community. As a reward for good behaviour the students at Mount Hawthorn Primary School receive praise in the form of tokens, their name being recorded in the ‘Gold Book’ certificates and prizes. The local community also supports this program by issuing Canteen icypole vouchers to students displaying good behaviour in the community.