Daily Archives: November 4, 2013

Change to School Times for 2014

The school day will finish at 3.10pm from the first day of 2014.

As you are all aware, the school must make changes to its timetable in 2014 to meet the requirements of the latest Enterprise Bargaining (EB) Agreement that defines employment conditions for teachers in South Australia.  All schools are slightly different in the manner in which they organise their timetables, for CLG the result of the new Agreement is that we must reduce our face to face teaching time by 50 minutes over a week.  

Given the experience of other schools in the area, the Governing Council asked staff to consider how this saving could be made with the least impact on student learning.  The result of their deliberation was a recommendation that we reduce one day of the week by 50 minutes.  Wednesday was chosen because it coincided with the early afternoon finish to the school day in a number of surrounding secondary schools.  This recommendation was put to the school community for comment and it’s fair to say that there was a great deal of comment. There were a number of well-articulated objections to an early finish one day a week, foremost being a lack of places in our after school care program for the number of parents that may be unable to make arrangements for the early finish.

With this feedback in hand, Governing Council asked the school two questions. Firstly, whether there was any way in which we could expand our after school care service to account for the early finish one day per week. Secondly, as an alternative, how we could take 10 minutes out of every school day.  Please keep in mind that changing the times or timing of lunch or recess does not satisfy the requirements of the EB for our school.

In terms of our capacity to expand our OHSC program, there simply isn’t any and we’ve tried to be creative.  Without the scope to increase OSHC places the option of finishing one day an hour early will cause hardship to many families. With this in mind Governing Council has asked the school to accommodate a ten minute per day saving which will mean that the school day will finish at 3.10pm from the first day of 2014. This is not a perfect solution and will never please all members of the school community but in trying to balance the needs of students, staff and parents we believe that it is the best compromise.

I’d like to thank staff for the considerable time spent examining all options.

John Harvey

Governing Council Chairperson