2025 Context
Our 2025 Shenton College Business Plan is the College’s fourth as an Independent Public School. It builds and refines on the strategic directions of the Shenton 2020 plan while retaining its determination and resolve: we remain a bold educational community striving to be at the forefront of education in this country.
What we set out to achieve through this business plan is underpinned by our great shared passion for the education and care of our students, and to make Shenton the very best school for its community.
The College has been externally reviewed four times as an Independent Public School, one of these as the first Exemplary Review of a secondary school in Western Australia. In every review, the College has received overwhelmingly positive findings, multiple commendations and the endorsement of the external reviewers. Prior to Shenton 2020, our business plans focused on the interconnected areas of Quality Teaching and Learning, Curriculum Differentiation and Educational Partnerships: these aspects continue to be embedded in the culture of the college. In the same way, the key Focus Areas of Shenton 2020: Successful Students; Connected Teachers; Engaged Leaders remain central to our direction and are retained within this cycle of planning.
Throughout the period of the last business plan, the College has continued to enjoy consistent and significant success, measured by performance in state and national testing, and participation and performance in significant co-curricular achievements. The College has maintained its status of being the pre-eminent local-select public school in WA.
These overwhelmingly positive outcomes, achieved through the commitment and hard work of all our community members, are sustained and protected by our planning processes. To this end, this new Shenton 2025 document can be understood as an evolution of the central tenets of the previous plan with some important refinements, particularly a delineation of our values. Identifying Care, Curiosity and Collaboration within our values is a transparent and forthright articulation of what defines us and an appropriate motivation for our teaching and learning culture.
The College leadership and community remain steadfastly committed that we should be at the forefront of education in this country and we intend to remain there through our shared efforts and passion for education.
The 2008 Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians had the twin goals of promoting equity and excellence and recognising that all young Australians should become successful learners; confident and creative individuals and active and informed citizens. This declaration is still at the heart of our planning, as are the key areas identified in the Director General’s Focus 2021 and the Department’s strategic plan Building on Strength: Future Directions for Western Australian public school system. The College enjoys an established culture that prioritises the intellectual, social, emotional, and physical wellbeing of every child as demonstrated by our motto: Much More than Marks; Learning for Life and its commitment to educating the whole child. In keeping with this, we retain a fundamental engagement with traditional disciplines: the arts, sciences, mathematics, humanities, and physical development.
The College has a longstanding and highly valued Learning Links partnership with the University of Western Australia. The relationship with UWA continues to be a defining narrative in many aspects of the College’s growth, in particular, the ongoing shared focus on enriching the educational experience of our students and building the opportunities for the professional development of our staff. This is a relationship framed by rich mutual interests and a recognition that school and tertiary sectors must work together. The College remains deliberately outward-looking, maintaining strong ties to schools and communities in China and Japan. The College is not immune to the dynamics of urban renewal and in particular, the underlying trend toward medium density housing, that was identified in the Shenton 2020 plan as a major impact on our community. As predicted, the College’s student population is approaching 2700, and there is an understanding that during this planning cycle we will need to consider how we respond to these numbers in terms of our built capacity. The College has been significantly transformed in recent years, with the completion of Shenton Stage 2 which has delivered on our Shenton 2020 expectations as emblematic of our growth in stature as an institution at the forefront of education in WA. The three schools model (Middle Ys7 & 8; Lower Senior Ys9 & 10; and Upper Senior Ys11 & 12) is now a successfully embedded College structure. The lesson is clear, however, we cannot stand still in a local and wider world that is changing rapidly — we must continue to develop opportunities to strengthen our capacity to respond to the needs of our students and the wider community. The upheaval of the global pandemic of 2020/21 has underlined the importance of institutional agility. These important lessons underpin and inform our Shenton 2025 planning.
With growth comes strategic opportunities to deliver more comprehensive programs to our community. In our recent planning cycle, the College invested in leadership in very important areas, appointing Level 3 leaders to support our provision for students with disabilities and also teacher development. The College has invested very significantly in Student Support, bringing the portfolio under the leadership and direction of an Associate Principal. The Student Support team has grown to include two new Student Support Officers; three School Psychologists and two school Nurses. This is a substantial increase in staffing and support for our students.
The College continues to be agile in its response to the demands of its educational community with the leadership initiating the development of outstanding programs and ensuring that existing ones remain well staffed and funded. The Shenton 2025 plan supports these initiatives, embeds them and sets out new opportunities for growth.