Education in the 21st Century is beginning to highlight new relationships that are emerging to create the most effective learning environments for our children. The Department of Education has broadened to become the Department of of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD). It recognises the need to plan a child's journey from birth through to employment and lifelong learning.
Community Schools
At North Shore Primary School, we are excited by the early successes of our focus to become a Community School, an approach that honours the African saying "that it takes a village to raise a child". Like the DEECD, we have formed strong partnerships with Neighbourhood Renewal (Department of Human Services), The Smith Family, Red Cross, BluEarth, Ardoch, The Geelong Community Shed, to name a few. Karen Moore, from Neighbourhood Renewal, has been working at both North Shore Primary School and Corio Primary School to build a model that will be extended across schools in the Corio-Norlane Education Regeneration Project. The model has been developed through community consultations across Corio-Norlane and seeks to provide access to learning and support beyond the traditional school hours of 9:00am to 3:30pm. Strategic partnerships should support families to better health, education, arts and social experiences within their local neighbourhood. It strives to support schools to overcome some of the barriers and challenges for our learners and their families. It if you would like to learn more, click this link...Community Schools Fact Sheet
Furthermore, we are excited about two proposed developments for the North Shore Primary School site.
Prep - Year 8
The first is the concept to extend education at our Tallis Street site to Year 8. There is not a timeline for this but there are concept drawing that highlight how the proposed addition to our learning centres might look. There is still a lot of work to be done and the designs need adjusting for some buildings, car-parking and access but these items get addressed when funding gets announced.
If you would like to view the rough concept plans...North Shore PS in Regeneration
Community or Services Hub
The other concept is that we develop a birth to school-age centre that will help families in the Norlane-North Shore area have a excellent start in life for their children. In the Strategic Plan for Corio-Norlane called Northern Futures, there is a strong commitment to developing the Community or Service Hub that would house Maternal and Child Health Services and also the Kindergarten. This is a carefully thought out move as the age of these two existing facilities in our neighbourhood is quite old. The Northern Futures document is a joint paper from the Federal, State and Local government leaders in our community and says that they, "Support the construction of service hubs, including new facilities to house the North Shore kindergarten and MCNH services at the re-developed North SHore Primary School site." School Council also supports this model which would be built on the land making up the corner of Gerbera and Tallis Streets.
