Village principle to raise school children

NOBLE Park Primary School supports a diverse community which is typically representative of the City of Greater Dandenong.
Nearly 90 per cent of our students come from a non-English speaking background, representing 40 different nationalities.
A significant number of our students come from refugee backgrounds so it is both a privilege and responsibility to offer additional support beyond mainstream schooling.
To that end, the NPPS staff and community take the attitude that being a school is not enough – we need to present ourselves as a community organisation.
The school has all of the standard curriculum offerings to ensure that all students work toward and beyond state-wide benchmarks.
However, given the needs of our students and families, we need to provide additional supports, an engaging curriculum and a range of learning and wellbeing alternatives.
The school offers small class sizes with each level of the school boasting an additional support teacher particularly to target the English as an additional language (EAL) students.
They work both in the home and in small group situations with these students.
As a further support to many of our students from our majority languages – Burmese, Khmer, Vietnamese and Afghan languages – we have multicultural education aides who are native speakers of those languages to support the students in the home room and their families.
Many of our students come from countries where literacy is, at least initially, derived from an oral tradition and we must pay attention to that in the nature of our curriculum delivery.
We have adopted a developmental curriculum approach to learning across the entire school which manifests itself in exploratory learning (play-based) in the junior years and then as an inquiry, project-based approach as the children progress through the school.
The essence of this approach is children at the centre of their learning with teachers building on their experiences at their point of need.
Children reflect on their learning and what they need to know with a myriad of opportunities to talk about their progress and presentation of their work in a variety of ways.
This learning is accompanied by our highly skilled staff providing high-level scaffolding upon the students’ experiences and explicit teaching to support the essential foundations of learning.
There are also additional staff who provide reading support and general learning support programs for students.
All of our learning programs are predicated on the notion that additional adults and mentors working with students is beneficial.
The raft of non-traditional offerings recognise the diverse needs of our students and families.
The following programs are designed to offer enrichment and alternative modalities for learning.
In most cases these are supported by partnerships the school has actively pursued to maximise the use of community resources in the form of donations and in particular volunteer help.
All of these programs are supportive of diverse learning needs, provide creative responses to learning English and they build social capital.
– Hooked on Books stemmed from our partnership with the Rotary Club of Noble Park, a great supporter of our school.
Volunteers come into the school to hear students read with students experiencing difficulty with their reading and those least likely to have someone to read to at home being targeted.
Our volunteers come from Rotary, Probus, the corporate sector and more recently students from Noble Park Secondary College.
– The Kitchen Garden program, supported by a philanthropic grant, offers rich experiential learning.
Students work in the garden on their designated day and produce a meal largely from our locally-grown produce.
– Enhanced Learning is an out-of-hours program supported by volunteers and finance from NAB.
Other volunteers are pre-service teachers from Monash University and local high school students.
Enhanced Learning targets students who might be disengaged from school, need to build self-esteem or would simply benefit from additional learning.
Students work on project-based skills in an eight-week program to produce a performance piece or artefact.
– Future Foundations is an arts-based program which focuses on artistic students and engages them in a 14-week program based at the school on Saturday mornings.
At the end of the program the students present their pieces at Deakin Edge in the city.
It is also important to mention just some of the programs which support families, including our two play groups, women’s group, adult English and vocational classes.
Everything we do at Noble Park Primary School is predicated on the notion that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’.
We welcome visitors and community members who might like to learn how they could support our special community.