Sunset State School
Queensland State School Reporting
2015 School Annual Report
Postal address / PO Box 1098 Mount Isa 4825Phone / (07) 4437 3444
Fax / (07) 4743 7401
Email /
Webpages / Additional reporting information pertaining to Queensland state schools is located on the My School website and the Queensland Government data website.
Contact person / The Principal
Principal’s foreword
Introduction
Sunset State School is one of North Queensland’s most successful schools based on attendance, participation in learning and assessment and parental support and involvement. This report outlines our story of success, what we stand for, how we teach and learn, how we support each other in building our community team and how we judge and celebrate our achievements. We are 5 years in to a 6 year renewal process, well on the way to the task we set ourselves of building Queensland’s best primary school.
School progress towards its goals in 2015
We set out to address the 6 key improvement strategies from the School Improvement Review in 2015 taking into account the State School Strategy, School Improvement Tool, Quality Teaching and Learning
· Reading – all students in prep, year 1 and year 2 achieving regional reading targets (determined from regression analysis data). This will be achieved through:
- Intensive Intervention in Prep during term 1 to develop foundation reading skills (Building Blocks to Literacy Framework)
- Explicit teaching of reading strategies in years 1 to 6 with a focus on the EALD learner
- Explicit teaching of comprehension strategies in Prep to Year 2 (4H) and Years 3 to 6 (Question-Answer-Relationship)
- Use of 4 Lesson Sequence, book orientation
- Aligning 3 cueing systems with Australian Curriculum reading content descriptors.
· Writing
- Continued implementation of 7 Steps to Writing Success in years 1 to 6
- Daily purposeful writing
· Attendance
- Continue focus on achieving a minimum 90% attendance rate across the school
- Continue to acknowledge and reward students who maintain 90-100% attendance.
Future outlook
Evidence of Progress towards our Goals: Our work so far:
· The school has a clear and sharp improvement agenda.
· The roles and responsibilities of the newly established leadership team are clearly defined and understood by staff.
· School leaders view reliable data as essential to effective educational leadership at school and classroom level.
· The school is developing systematic approaches to staff development and capability.
· The school allocates its resources to support student learning and wellbeing.
· The school utilises wide ranging and innovative community engagement strategies to assist in student wellbeing and achievement.
· Staff believe that all students can achieve at Sunset State School.
· The school has a detailed whole-school curriculum plan.
Identified Strategies for Improvement: Our Targets through 2015 and into 2016
Review, clarify and communicate the distribution of leadership roles and responsibilities to school staff and the community. Develop the instructional capacity of the team to engage in evidenced and research-based strategies.
Develop and formalise a feedback culture of coaching, modelling and mentoring to build teacher capability and consistency in agreed pedagogy and practice.
Develop teacher data literacy skills to assist in identifying starting points for teaching, tracking, monitoring and analysing student learning.
Ensure professional learning opportunities for staff are linked to the school’s professional learning plan, further developing differentiated teaching and learning practices within classrooms to engage and challenge all students including high achievers.
Develop an inclusive, transparent and strategic approach to the allocation of resources, ensuring alignment with key school actions and targets that is communicated widely to staff and community.
Consider strategies to engage key stakeholders including staff, parents and community representatives in the creation of the school improvement agenda and associated priorities.
Our school at a glanceSchool Profile
Coeducational or single sex: Coeducational
Independent Public School: No
Year levels offered in 2015: Prep Year - Year 6
Student enrolments for this school:
Total / Girls / Boys / Indigenous / Enrolment Continuity(Feb – Nov)
2013 / 295 / 141 / 154 / 229 / 79%
2014 / 275 / 125 / 150 / 207 / 75%
2015 / 257 / 121 / 136 / 204 / 76%
Characteristics of the student body:
Our school is a Low SES school and our catchment is considerably disadvantaged. We have approximately 81% indigenous children, but regardless our resources are for all. Education at our school is completely free: parents and caregivers pay for nothing as part of our charter to make our world class teaching standard available to all. We wear our school uniform proudly and assist families, if necessary, with any genuine need they have to overcome disadvantage. We operate a school bus for families who genuinely need transport assistance, we have a laundry and clothing store and operate a breakfast program: all free of charge to parents. Generally speaking, many of our children identify as EALD, having no real exposure to Standard Australian English until they enrol in our Prep. That is why our Prep is a language rich environment with an adult/child ratio of no more than 1 to 12. Our Prep groups of no more than 20 students enjoy a full time teacher and a full time teacher aide to provide an intensive, enjoyable and productive exposure to English in their early years.
Average class sizes
Phase / Average Class Size /2013 / 2014 / 2015 /
Prep – Year 3 / 24 / 19 / 21
Year 4 – Year 7 Primary / 27 / 20 / 24
Year 7 Secondary – Year 10
Year 11 – Year 12
*From 2015, data for all state high schools include Year 7 students. Prior to 2015, only state high schools offering Year 7 had these students included in their counts.
School Disciplinary Absences
Disciplinary Absences / Count of Incidents /2013 / 2014* / 2015** /
Short Suspensions - 1 to 5 days / 26 / 92 / 43
Long Suspensions - 6 to 20 days / 7 / 10 / 0
Exclusions / 1 / 2 / 0
Cancellations of Enrolment / 0 / 0 / 0
Curriculum delivery
Our approach to curriculum delivery
Curriculum offerings: Our distinctive curriculum offerings
Every child in our school enjoys a double, air-conditioned teaching space and the real difference between us and other schools is that our classes enjoy full time teacher aide support specifically aimed at Reading Comprehension and Number work intervention. The performance of every child in our school is shared across the school and we believe that when a single child achieves, we all achieve and similarly when any child underachieves in any field we share the obligation as a community to grow and improve that child.
During 2015, 2 brand new initiatives continued in our school. Our school Wide Positive Behaviour Support program is fully embedded and operational. This has resulted in a much lower rate of behavioural incident across our school with behaviours such as bullying virtually eliminated. Likewise, the learning environment is calmer, more relaxed and more focused than ever with many more “Tiger Tags” for positive behavior now being issued.
The bonus in all of this is the dramatic improvement we have seen in the normal classroom environments where we now have almost no interference to our stated objective of uninterrupted teaching and learning. The details of these initiatives can be found below.
Extra curricula activities
The growth of the Sunset Tigers Sports Club.
The Sunset Tigers was born out of a need to provide a number of services to Sunset Students and anyone else who wanted to join the club. Our club assists children to
o Build self- esteem and establish a winning culture
o Overcome poverty as a barrier to sports participation
o Engage, especially those at risk of disengaging from school, through rugby league, particularly during out of school hours and at weekends
o Raise standards and expectations of club members to a continual standard of excellence
The club has grown above all expectations and in 2016 will be expanded to included our sister club the Wanderers with an aquatics arm also added to the club agenda. 2016 will see the appointment through the school of a School based Activities officer to manage and oversee our club. This officer will have work hours as follows
o Monday to Friday: 2.30pm to 5pm
o Saturday: 10am to 3pm
o Sunday with the Tigers from 8am to Midday probably in the role of general organiser and coach.
This position is being established because the movement of our year 7 students to high school has left a gap in our operation: we no longer have an U13 team and many of our Sunset students are drifting off the radar. There is also a major issue with boredom amongst the more vulnerable kids in our catchment which I hope to go some way towards addressing. This is where the Wanderers football club comes in because we need a partnership with a club that
o Provides high standard male role models and associates for our students. This in no way suggests we don’t highly value our female team members
o Assists us at our training days, possibly as coaches or special skills session providers
o Assists us in keeping kids engaged in sport through work ethic and life attitude.
Our partners in this arrangement will be but won’t be limited to
o Queensland police
o PCYC
o School Adopt -a- cop
o Ngukuthati children and family centre
o Centalink
o Wanderers Football club
How Information and Communication Technologies are used to improve learning
In 2015, Sunset State School appointed a Communication and Technologies Officer to action the
· Teaching of the Australian Curriculum in the field of Information technologies
· Maintenance and repair of school hard and soft ware
· School requirement of
1. 6 fully operational computers in each classroom
2. Desktop lab in the Library classroom
3. Distribution of the XO computer stock to Prep
· Provision of in class teaching support for classroom teachers and aides
· Management of a technologies budget
· Improvement of the staff opinion survey percentage re: technologies to 95%+
· Provision of emergent classroom relief as may be required by the Principal or Deputy Principal.
Social Climate
Parent, student and staff satisfaction with the school
Performance measure /Percentage of parent/caregivers who agree# that: / 2013 / 2014 / 2015 /
their child is getting a good education at school (S2016) / 100% / DW / 100%
this is a good school (S2035) / 94% / DW / 100%
their child likes being at this school (S2001) / 100% / DW / 100%
their child feels safe at this school (S2002) / 100% / DW / 100%
their child's learning needs are being met at this school (S2003) / 100% / DW / 100%
their child is making good progress at this school (S2004) / 100% / DW / 100%
teachers at this school expect their child to do his or her best (S2005) / 100% / DW / 100%
teachers at this school provide their child with useful feedback about his or her school work (S2006) / 100% / DW / DW
teachers at this school motivate their child to learn (S2007) / 100% / DW / 100%
teachers at this school treat students fairly (S2008) / 88% / DW / 100%
they can talk to their child's teachers about their concerns (S2009) / 94% / DW / 100%
this school works with them to support their child's learning (S2010) / 100% / DW / DW
this school takes parents' opinions seriously (S2011) / 94% / DW / 100%
student behaviour is well managed at this school (S2012) / 88% / DW / 100%
this school looks for ways to improve (S2013) / 88% / DW / 100%
this school is well maintained (S2014) / 100% / DW / 100%
Performance measure /
Percentage of students who agree# that: / 2013 / 2014 / 2015 /
they are getting a good education at school (S2048) / 91% / 89% / 96%
they like being at their school (S2036) / 89% / 84% / 95%
they feel safe at their school (S2037) / 85% / 75% / 93%
their teachers motivate them to learn (S2038) / 96% / 90% / 96%
their teachers expect them to do their best (S2039) / 98% / 92% / 100%
their teachers provide them with useful feedback about their school work (S2040) / 91% / 88% / 85%
teachers treat students fairly at their school (S2041) / 84% / 83% / 93%
they can talk to their teachers about their concerns (S2042) / 87% / 76% / 87%
their school takes students' opinions seriously (S2043) / 85% / 76% / 87%
student behaviour is well managed at their school (S2044) / 70% / 59% / 77%
their school looks for ways to improve (S2045) / 91% / 92% / 96%
their school is well maintained (S2046) / 89% / 86% / 98%
their school gives them opportunities to do interesting things (S2047) / 89% / 87% / 96%
Performance measure /
Percentage of school staff who agree# that: / 2013 / 2014 / 2015 /
they enjoy working at their school (S2069) / 93% / 100% / 76%
they feel that their school is a safe place in which to work (S2070) / 89% / 90% / 100%
they receive useful feedback about their work at their school (S2071) / 78% / 83% / 50%
they feel confident embedding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives across the learning areas (S2114) / 100% / 90% / 100%
students are encouraged to do their best at their school (S2072) / 93% / 97% / 95%
students are treated fairly at their school (S2073) / 70% / 83% / 86%
student behaviour is well managed at their school (S2074) / 63% / 72% / 95%
staff are well supported at their school (S2075) / 74% / 72% / 45%
their school takes staff opinions seriously (S2076) / 65% / 69% / 59%
their school looks for ways to improve (S2077) / 85% / 93% / 81%
their school is well maintained (S2078) / 96% / 97% / 86%
their school gives them opportunities to do interesting things (S2079) / 96% / 83% / 86%
# ‘Agree’ represents the percentage of respondents who Somewhat Agree, Agree or Strongly Agree with the statement.