Dear families,

Like all schools in the Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn, St Francis Xavier has been participating in the Catalyst initiative since 2021. All our teachers have been engaged in Catalyst professional learning with adoption of a common curriculum and classroom approach, with teachers implementing High Impact Teaching Practices across the Archdiocese. Some of you may have come across articles in the national and international media about the success of this initiative. This has resulted in an increase in student participation in class, adoption of explicit instruction with programs such as Spelling Mastery, Initialit and the Connecting Maths Concepts, and OzEScience, all successfully implemented at St Francis Xavier, with the support from Canberra Goulburn CE and Good to Great Schools Australia.

We are seeing improvement in student performance at St Francis Xavier and across the Canberra Goulburn Archdiocese.

Last week I was in Canberra for the Catholic Leaders Day with all Principals from our System. One of the presentations on the day was from Tim McDonald on "What is a Behaviour Curriculum? Tim spoke about the need to form habits around behaviour for our students to enable them to achieve their potential in learning and reduce low engagement and unproductiveness in lessons. This will be a focus for St Francis Xavier School in 2024.