AddressThompsons West Primary School will open in Term 1, 2025 and will be a state-of-the-art educational facility that from the outset will strive for high student achievement and excellence. Thompsons West Primary School will be a dynamic learning community providing diverse and challenging educational opportunities. As a learning community, we will have a collective commitment to nurturing strong positive attitudes to lifelong learning to develop our students as empowered citizens with strong voice and agency.
We will recruit highly professional, dedicated and dynamic staff who are committed to ensuring all students achieve their personal best potential by constantly striving for their own continual professional growth and encouraging students to do the same in learning and wellbeing.
Thompsons West Primary School principal and staff, along with our school community have the exciting opportunity of establishing a dynamic and vibrant learning community with a strong and positive culture to serve our local community. An aspirational culture that is inclusive and welcoming, with high expectations for success.
Our Vision
To develop confident and curious learners with strong learner agency who respect and care themselves, others and our lands and always strive for growth.
Our Mission
We aim to develop the skills, attitudes, abilities, and dispositions of students to achieve their full academic, creative and emotional and social potential to enable them to be confident and responsible global citizens who can make positive lifelong contributions to society and the world.
Our Values
Respect
Care
Kindness
Growth
Thompsons West Primary School will embrace contemporary research and evidence-based pedagogies and teaching and learning practices. We will be committed to ensuring every student has the best possible opportunity to succeed, achieving academic and personal wellbeing success. We will provide an innovative, inclusive, and future focused learning environment where all stakeholders are expected to be creative and critical thinkers to achieve and thrive as learners, leaders and citizens.
We aim to develop the capacity of all students to be empowered agentic learners with aspirational expectations of learning, progress and achievement. Agentic learners who understand what and why they are learning, how they are going, where they will go next working in partnership with staff to monitor their progress and co-create learning goals to inform future learning.
The curriculum at Thompsons West Primary School will be based on Victorian Curriculum, which is expected of all government schools in Victoria. Contemporary pedagogical teaching and learning practices will be implemented across all areas of the curriculum with consistent instructional models across all classrooms.
Students and their wellbeing will lie at the centre of Thompsons West Primary School's vision and will drive all our decisions and actions. Students with high levels of learner agency will be actively involved in partnership with staff in identifying and addressing issues in their learning environments to ensure their learning needs are met.
The following principles (Timperley, Spiral of Inquiry) at the core and guide our pedagogical approach:
1. Learners at the centre
2. Social nature of learning
3. Emotions are integral to learning
4. Recognising individual differences
5. Stretching all students
6. Assessment for learning
7. Building horizontal connections
Our school culture will be inclusive and welcoming, ensuring everyone has a sense of pride, belonging and high expectations for continual growth and success built on trust, respect, care and kind interactions. It will be underpinned by an aspirational school community, where all learning community members (staff, students, parents, and local community) hold high expectations, positive beliefs, a collective growth mindset and mind frames about themselves and others as learners and about learning. A collaborative culture with collective responsibility for student achievement, engagement and wellbeing, and one that values both student and adult learning. A culture where we can grow, learn and expand together with a collective commitment to always having our student's best interests at the centre of all decisions and actions.
Our aim is to develop our students into:
· Passionate, confident, and curious learners who have a lifelong love and joy of learning.
· Thriving, empowered global citizens with highly developed learner agency and voice to impact positive change in society.
Our Thompsons West Primary School learner beliefs and mindsets/frames are informed by the research conducted by John Hattie and the principles of Visible Learning and visible teaching and Russell Quaglia's work around student voice.
Thompson West Primary School will provide a vibrant and dynamic learning environment that will support, nurture and encourage all stakeholders to continually strive for growth. Staff and students are continuous learners who are always growing and developing. Confidence, motivation and engagement in learning are key learner characteristics that are encouraged and nurtured in all learners in our school community:
· Confidence to engage in learning.
· Motivation to embrace the challenge of learning.
· Engagement in learning by striving and wanting to thrive in learning.
Embracing contemporary pedagogies, students develop as agentic learners: empowered learners with strong voice and learner agency who are active:
· self assesors,
· goal setters and
· goal getters
Agentic learners experience the joy of learning and constantly reflect and celebrate their learning. They embrace productive struggle in their learning and the thrill and feeling of exhilaration that comes from success in learning after persevering through challenges. They develop emotional literacy skills, communication, and collaboration skills, creative and critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
Agentic students have a strong voice that they confidently use to share thoughts and ideas in an environment underpinned by trust and respect, they offer realistic suggestions for the good of the whole and accept responsibility for not only what is said but also what needs to be done. (Russell Quaglia). Agentic students have well developed positive learning mindsets that form a frame of reference for lifelong learning and can harness the workings of their minds to continuously generate and strengthen the components of their mind. They are both independent and interdependent learners.
Our agentic students will have a focus on developing exceptional academic skills and knowledge alongside highly developed voice, learner agency and leadership skills that enable them to take responsibility and drive their learning and wellbeing.
Our learning community will provide an environment in which staff work in an inclusive, supporting, respectful and caring workplace, where students are highly engaged in meaningful and relevant learning tasks. We believe that, to all members of our staff, it will mean something significant to work at Thompson West Primary School, having exciting opportunities to contribute to co-creating our innovative and contemporary learning environment and to embrace the continual professional growth, learning and development opportunities to ensure our students are provided with learning environments that inspire them to continue to grow and learn. Innovation will be encouraged with creativity and curiosity being fostered in staff to help them imagine new possibilities for teaching and learning. Through our innovative pedagogical approaches, our students will be experience and feel the joy and exhilaration that comes from stretching themselves in their learning and working hard to achieve their learning goals. As members of our new learning community, staff will be committed and passionate about our pedagogical approach and take on the personal responsibility of working towards building and maintaining a positive learning culture for all.
We strive to engender a parent community that respects and appreciates the commitment of the members of staff and this, in turn, builds an environment where all members of staff feel appreciated and thus more willing to add discretionary effort. In a culture such as this, there is an expectation amongst staff that all will contribute in a significant way to the accomplishments of the school and that all will share in the pride of the resulting success.
With students at the centre of all decision making, staff work collaboratively engaging in ongoing professional learning and creating challenging, engaging and differentiated learning opportunities that embed Thompson West Primary School's pedagogical approach. Through our dynamic teaching and learning environment staff will develop students through differentiated, explicit, future focused teaching and learning opportunities that develop our students as agentic learners. Learners who have control and voice over their learning as they develop their own innovative learning dispositions, skills, attitudes and tools to manage and take responsibility for their aspirational learning, progress and achievement.
Staff work in a collaborative culture that promotes learner agency for all, where they see themselves as learners too.
"Collaboration is learning together."
"Collaboration is learning out loud."
Tracey Ezard
"Collaborative professionalism is about how teachers and other educators transform learning and teaching together to work with all students to develop fulfilling lives of meaning, purpose and success."
Andy Hargreaves and Michael O'Connor. 2017
Staff, along with parents/carers have a collective responsibility to contribute in respectful, positive and meaningful ways to ensure we have our students' best interests at the centre of all that we do. There is an expectation that everyone will treat each other with respect, care and kindness.
Our students, staff and parents/carers as part of our vibrant and dynamic learning community have a collective commitment to the following beliefs and principles:
· We provide a safe, inclusive and challenging learning environment.
· We develop our students as holistic learners who will contribute positively to our society as they grow and develop.
· We all develop our `learner agency' as a continuous process and the pursuit of continuous improvement is inherent within our learning environment.
· We believe that all students can achieve success in learning and academic results, given adequate time and support.
· We hold high expectations and standards for staff, student and parents' interactions and behaviour.
As a learning community we are all invested in continually striving to learn and grow together to further develop our collective learner agency to ensure our students have the best possible learning and life outcomes.
