As we approach the last part of winter and the daylight is lasting a little longer and we can see the first signs of Spring trying to break through we look at all that has been happening over the first part of term 3. This includes.
The eSafety commissioner has just released a 3-month report evaluating the impact of the social media age restrictions on our young people.
Please click here to see the report
This report explores the early experiences of children, as well as their parents, three months after the commencement of Australia’s social media age restrictions.
It describes early findings from eSafety’s evaluation of the age restrictions, drawing on baseline data collected before the commencement of the age restrictions (November to December 2025) and data from the three-month follow-up survey (March to April 2026).
This report is the first in a series that will be published over the course of the two-year evaluation.
It highlights any changes observed since the commencement of the age restrictions and provides an early assessment of how the restrictions are being implemented and experienced (for example, whether children continue to hold accounts on age-restricted social media platforms or have lost access to them), alongside early outcomes and any potential unintended consequence.
While substantial changes were not necessarily expected at this early stage, the report highlights how the restrictions are being experienced by children and their families, helping to identify emerging issues that may warrant ongoing monitoring.
What this report can and cannot tell us
This report provides a snapshot of children’s and parents’ early experiences three months after the commencement of the social media age restrictions, offering insight into initial patterns of access, behaviour, and emerging signals of change.
Importantly, the value of this report lies not in determining the long-term effectiveness of the policy, but in examining whether the early changes anticipated under the policy are beginning to occur and whether the foundations for longer-term outcomes are being established.
We encourage our families to take a look at this report and the summary report of their findings. We will continue to share this information with our parent community.
We have over the course of the last couple of weeks needed to send a number of students who have been unwell which is understandable given the winter months.
We have also had a number of parents/guardians come over the course of the day needing to collect their child/children. We understand that at times this is unavoidable but please note that sometimes due to movement of classes, students moving to specialist areas such as the Sports oval or Design Education that this can sometimes take some time.
We thank you for your understanding in this space.
As part of our involvement in the Refugee Education Support Program we held the term 3 meeting at Marian on Wednesday 12th August.
This involved a gathering of 40 staff from a range of primary and secondary schools in the Brimbank Melton area that are working collectively to support our families from a refugee background.
The focus of the day was around the best ways to support our families with simple measures such as ensuring that our families receive material from school not only in English but in their native tongue.
We discussed this in our context and how we can best support our families at events such as parent teacher conferences.
We are working towards developing a project with the help of our families that would identify the best ways to support our families. In some schools this has been a homework club or family gatherings around food. Feed them and they will come.
Our Year 10’s with the support of our school nurse Sabrina have been involved in the council immunization program for meningococcal.
This is such an important free service provided by the council to ensure that our young people are protected from diseases.
One of the ways that we as a society ensure that these diseases are kept under control is by a vaccination program that supports HERD immunity that then offers protection for all, espcially the most vulnerable within our community.
Those students who did not receive their vaccination from the council will be followed up by the council to ensure that they are at least receiving the vaccination from their own medical practitioners.
Over the course of this term we have found several members of our community who are struggling with our uniform expectations in relation to grooming such as false eyelashes, nails and facial piercings. This has required our Community Leaders and Director of Students to either withdraw students or send them home to correct these concerns. We made adjustments to our piercings policy last year – where students can have a plug but not the stud during the school day, but a number of our students feel that this may not apply to them.
We thank all our students and families that support our uniform expectations by ensuring that their students are in the correct uniform on a daily basis.
Thank you to all our families that support our attendance processes by calling the school and confirming that their child is absent for the day and the reason why.
Can we also remind families that if you know that your child has an appointment during the day and needs to leave early, that if they bring a note in the morning that this will be checked by their homeroom teacher and they will be given a leaving early pass that they will present at student reception when they depart.
Finally, a government expectation is that all families explain their child’s absence when this occurs. We remind our families that our expectation is the government expectation. This includes completing the Attendance Follow up documents if your child brings them home.
We are now only a few weeks away from September and the second half of term 3. It is hard to believe that term 4 is just around the corner. How time flies! in the meantime take care of yourself and your wellbeing and check on a friend to see how they are travelling as well.
The strength of a community is its collective wellbeing