Print this page

Self Assessment Overview

The culture of the College is shaped by the critical role that self-reflection and review plays in growth and improvement. Following a review of the success of our Shenton 2020 Business Plan, we have decided to reaffirm the central Focus Areas in this new document. This alignment of focus reflects the feedback garnered from our most recent IPS Review in 2019. The College maintains a focus on teaching as a practice that can be reflected upon, deconstructed and consequently improved. Our teachers are learners, and we support them to remain students of their own craft. Collectively we share a role in reflecting on where we are currently at, knowing where we want to progress to and sharing a clear and communicated strategic vision on how to get there.

As part of the Shenton 2025 consultative process, there has been a thorough reflection on the progress made under the previous business plan and an examination of:

• Student academic performance data
• Vocational Education and Training completion
• Non-academic data (attendance, behaviour, retention)
• Examination of data from the School Performance Monitoring System
• Prerequisites for successful students: teaching, learning environment
• Enablers for successful students: leadership, relationships, parent engagement, resources.

The College has an expectation that all students and staff will engage in highly reflective practices. These will invariably take many forms but may include critical reflection on assessment tasks, investigating trends in student performance, student voice feedback, and staff interrogating the full range of system-level data to establish where we are doing well and how we can improve.

At the core of our institution’s business are successful students and we make no apologies for focusing all of our decision-making on developing strategic and innovative processes that strengthen student outcomes, and then celebrating those students as they achieve their best. We continue to focus our energies in developing our own practices, while strengthening meaningful relationships with parents, education and industry partners, and the wider community, all of whom play a key role in providing opportunities and support for our students.

In our 2019 IPS Review, the Public School Review Director, Mr Brett Hunt, noted that our College set an impressive benchmark for public schooling in our State. Particularly pleasing were his observations that:

• Having assessed the College on three separate occasions, he considers that the standards of excellence have become culturally embedded throughout the staff and student bodies,
• High-level leadership and alignment to a clear moral purpose is evident throughout all levels of the leadership hierarchy, and;
• The assessment demonstrated that Shenton’s emphasis on authenticity (delivering on what is said to be important), alignment (between strategy and operational performance) and accountability (regular measurement and transparency)

We remain committed to these areas of our school performance and recognise the benefit of setting more detailed and challenging targets that look at the fine-grained indicators of student academic achievement and progress. We also seek to sustain and grow the innovative practice of using measures that demonstrate progress in non-academic areas of student achievement, including areas such as student participation, engagement in co-curricular activities and community initiatives, and our school commitment to developing the whole child.

Since our last business plan, we have welcomed some significant additions to our built campus, in the form of our new Learning Hub in the Senior School, an extension to our gymnasium and a new TechSpace facility. With the continued growth in student numbers, we continue to seek ways to innovate and strengthen learning cultures, resources and connections that best support adolescent learning and recreation. Our continued and growing success will be underpinned by our capacity to recruit and develop high-quality teaching staff and educational leaders and providing them with the highest quality resources they need to support their professional practices.