Welcome back to the new school year. Staff have been working over the last few weeks in preparation, and all that work was made meaningful when students returned on Thursday. It was great to see so many students for the first day back.

Every school day matters. By showing up at school every day, your child will be in the best position to take advantage of all the opportunities available to them. Over the coming weeks, when you are contacted by your child’s Home Group Teacher or other members of staff, please let us know if there is anything we can do to support their attendance.

We have made considerable progress over the last two years in our school improvement journey. Suspensions were down 25% year-on-year in 2022 and a further 23% down in Term 4 of 2023 compared to the previous year. We will be working together to build further on the progress already made with two key priorities in our School Improvement Plan. The first is to improve student outcomes through a focus on reading. The second is to increase engagement and wellbeing for learning through a schoolwide approach to inclusive practice.

We have shown that we can make a difference when we work together. This is the New Norfolk Way, the collective endeavour to realise our vision for the school as a respectful learning community with high expectations for ourselves, for others, and for the way in which we learn together. It is a great time to be at our school and I am excited to continue this work with our whole school community.

Stuart Lord, Principal

Coming Events

Thursday 22nd February

• P4 Values Assembly

Friday 1st March

• Swimming Carnival

Wednesday 6th March

• School photo day

Thursday 7th March

• P4 Values Assembly

Monday 11th March

• Eight hour day public holiday

Wednesday 13th March - Monday 25th March

• NAPLAN

Term Dates

Term 1: Thursday 8th February - Friday 12th April

• Easter: Friday 29th March - Tuesday 2nd April

Term 2: Monday 29th April - Friday 5th July

Term 3: Monday 22nd July - Friday 27th September

Term 4: Monday 14th October - Thursday 19th December

Welcome back to the 2024 School Year.  It has been great to welcome new and returning students and staff to New Norfolk High School.

Our Values continue to underpin everything we do here at school and this year we have made some slight changes to our school values to bring them in line with the new DECYP values.  We will now have 5 school values: Connection, Respect, Growth, Courage and Responsibility.  We will continue to have a fortnightly values focus as well as fortnightly assemblies to recognise those students who consistently display our school values.  Our focus value for Term 1 is Courage and the first focus is having the courage to accept new challenges.  There have been countless examples of students displaying this focus as they navigate new challenges in new classes, new grades and new subjects.

In order to reward positive behaviour school staff have been awarding Values Incentive Points, or VIPs for short, to students they catch displaying our values.  Each fortnight the students with the most points in each home group will be invited to a morning tea and at the end of the term we will have a VIP where students will be given the opportunity to participate in a range of fun activities depending on how many VIPs they have earnt that term.

Ali Walker

Assistant Principal

Grade 7

• Coordinator: Ms Deb Gardiner
• AST: Ms Nadia Coates
• 71: Ms Erika Thomson
• 72: Miss Winsome Harradine
• 73: Miss Elinor Howe

Grade 8

• Coordinator: Mr Ethan Armstrong
• AST: Mrs Nicole Reeve
• 81: Mr Adam Gordon
• 82: Mr Kyle Underdown
• 83: Ms Michelle Manenti

Grade 9

• Coordinator/AST: Ms Amanda Hughes
• Coordinator/AST: Ms Sue Murray
• 91: Ms Emily Drinkell
• 92: Mr Matt Wilkie
• 93: Mr Lewis Matheson

Grade 10

• Coordinator/AST: Ms Felicity Copeland
• AST/Literacy coach: Ms Pip Dimmick
• 101: Miss Carly Wright
• 102: Ms Jaymie Hall
• 103: Ms Silvia Escobar

Year 11/12

• Coordinator/AST: Ms Jessica Cepeniuk

The Grade Sevens have made a cracking start to the year. Our first morning was spent organising books and classrooms and getting to know each other. They had a great time with team building activities such as building an Eiffel Tower out of newspaper, making some agamographs that embrace our school values and a cup stack. They participated in their first whole school assembly, practiced our fire drill procedure, checked out our new breakout, reset for learning room “The Space” and Ms Coates rewarded everyone with an icy pole on the lawn. We are looking forward to a great year ahead.

During the Christmas holidays I was invited to a two day workshop at the University of Tasmania, Sandy Bay Campus. I was the only public school student to attend. Over the two days we participated in activities in mathematics and biology at university standard. We were able to learn material at an advanced standard. On the first day we were asked to solve the internal volume of any pyramid by figuring out our own formula. I was able to solve the internal volume of an oblique pyramid which, I was told, I was one of the only people to be able to do this. On the second day, we learned about biology and how our immune system works. We also learned about cells in the human body, how the body creates and replicates them, how that ties into how people don't live forever, and why cells slowly degrade. It was a great opportunity to be involved in and I enjoyed the experience very much.

John Van Eyk, Grade 9