Annual Report 2017

Established in 1980, King's Christian College seeks to work in partnership with parents to educate students in Christian leadership for tomorrow's generation. We are a multi-faceted school and encourage students to seek out and discover where their individual gifts lie, and give them the opportunity to excel in many areas. Over the years, King's students have achieved highly in a wide range of activities.

A major focus is in the area of character development. Qualifications will open doors, but it is an individual's attitude and character that will often determine success in life. Many of the activities in the daily life of the College are designed to instill these attitudes and character traits.

Characteristics of the Student Body

The proportions of boys and girls from Prep to Year 12 and the number of Indigenous students for 2017 are below:

Distinctive Curriculum Offerings

King’s is a non-denominational co-educational Christian College. It offers a wide range of subjects and caters for both very advanced learners and students who need additional help. It has a comprehensive sporting program and an unusually wide range of co-curricular programs.

Extra Curricular Activities

High School

Primary School

The Social Climate of the School

The King’s Chaplaincy team is involved in a number of programs to support families both in and out of school, particularly focusing on families who have a need of additional support. This is done by a program of working with small groups providing safe places for students to go during break times, being involved in camping programs, organised activities and at times academic help to a limited level. Chaplains are involved in after-hours work assisting families in liaising with youth groups and responding to emergencies. They are also involved in assisting school staff with school activities such as after-hours surfing, excursion, preparation etc.

King’s has an anti-bullying and harassment policy which seeks to ensure that a positive College culture is maintained through community leadership, in the form of behavioural boundaries, while also providing the opportunity for spiritual redemption from the impact of sin for all members of the College community.

Parental Involvement

King’s was established to work in partnership with parents in educating their children. We strongly encourage parental involvement in the P&F, volunteer program and in the many sport, co-curricular and pastoral activities.

Parent, Teacher and Student Satisfaction With The School

Findings of surveys or studies of parents, students and teachers for the purpose of marketing and school improvement.

Contact for further Information

For general College information visit our website at www.kingscollege.qld.edu.au
Stephen Wruck, Community Relations Manager, can be contacted on 07 5578 7600.

Staff Composition

The staffing composition is set out below:

Qualifications of All Teachers*

*Some teaching staff have more than one qualification

Expenditure & Teacher Participation in Professional Development

The total funds expended on teacher professional development in 2017 were $163,222.75.

The major professional development initiatives were as follows:

• Senior First Aid Refresher SR060416
• Hillsong Conference
• Hillsong Colour Your World Women’s Conference
• Middle Management Retreat
• Various staff meetings and planning days
• QSA Workshops
• Teach Tech Play Conference
• IPSHA Meeting
• Leading a Digital School Conference
• Guest speakers
• Most Likely to Succeed
• Creating a culture for writing
• Numeracy PD
• Mindset Maths Seminar
• ACS Developing Leaders Conference

The involvement of the teaching staff in professional development activities during 2017 was 98%.

Average Staff Attendance (Based on unplanned absences of sick and emergency leave periods of up to 5 days)

For permanent and temporary staff and school leaders, the staff attendance rate was 98% at Reedy Creek and 98% at Pimpama in 2017.

Proportion of Teaching Staff Retained from Previous Year

From the end of 2016, 94% of staff were retained for the entire 2017 school year.

Average Student Attendance Rate

The average attendance rate as a percentage in 2017 for Reedy Creek was 92.3% and Pimpama was 94.2%.

Roll call is conducted at the beginning of each day. Where student absences are unexplained, parents are contacted by SMS.

Reading, Writing & Numeracy Benchmark Data

Below are the Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 National Test Results for 2017.

Apparent Retention Rate

Year 12 student enrolment as a percentage of the Year 10 cohort for 2017 is 87.2 %.

Year 12 Outcomes

Information Communication Technology Services

In 2017, the College’s 1 to 1 program in Years 5-12 continues to grow with a device in the hand of 1285 students and 196 staff across the Reedy Creek and Pimpama campuses. Shared iPads in the Primary School increased from 8 to 10 per classroom from Prep through to Year 4 and were all upgraded to iPad Air 2 models. Internet bandwidth was also upgraded at Reedy Creek from 200/200 to 400/400 Mbit/s and at Pimpama from 20/20 to 50/50 Mbit/s, allowing capacity for our continued growth.

Education staff professional development throughout the College has led to continued innovation in teaching and learning. This year staff attended a growing number of high value conferences including Future Schools, the Google Apps for Education (GAFE) Summit, the NewTech Annual Conference, iPadalooza, a 2 Day Apple Coding workshop and the Leading a Digital School Conference. Our IT department was also involved in the quarterly SEQ Apple Education forums as well as the Google Apps for Education Summit and the XWorld event for Mac admins.

In addition to training on our new Learning Management System, staff also undertook Professional Development from external providers like Apple Education and the NewTech Network. This was complemented by a number of sessions run internally by our own very competent and capable staff.

King’s was again nominated as an Apple Distinguished School (ADS) and, for the first time, presented some of its leading work with iPads and robotics at their ADS Summit held at St Hilda’s in June 2017. A small complement of our IDT staff were in attendance. It was a great opportunity to showcase work that has come from the newly developed Fablab space in the High School, which contains a laser cutter, multiple 3D printers and other facilities that create the perfect environment to nurture STEM skills.

This year, a small contingent of our students attended the BrisMakerFest at the State Library and some were featured in the news media demonstrating robotics projects. They also attended the Youth Entrepreneurs and STEAM Ambassadors Conference in Ipswich where they had the realisation that our facilities and projects at King’s were on or above par with other schools in our region. This has spawned heavier involvement in Fablab projects during lunchtimes and has also formed the seminal idea for having our own Makerfest at King’s.

Our eSmart Coordinator, Mr Carl Hotko continues to work tirelessly to help create an environment where the safe, smart and responsible use of technology becomes the norm. Regular meetings with the Dean of Students and Director of Curriculum Innovation have helped to build and maintain our cyber safety systems across the school and continues to keep us on track with the eSmart program. Our first stall appeared at Carnival Day in 2017, where we provided resource to interested parents regarding online safety and security.

The Concern reporting portal for students has been working well. General esafety issues continue to revolve around respect towards others and appropriate use of devices during class time. Mr Hotko attended the eSafety 2017 Conference which provided insight into the potential legal ramifications of how cyberbullying and digital harassment are addressed in schools around Australia. We are progressing well in the development of process and policy in these areas.

Technologies Curriculum in Primary soared to greater heights with an improved Technology Curriculum being introduced by Specialists. Plans for an Innovation Hub were set in motion which will take the curriculum to new heights with student STEM, robotics and maker projects.

In response to a growing need to draw a number of disparate systems together for admin, staff, parents and students, research was conducted into a new learning management and communication system. The Alaress-created Schoolbox seemed to be a viable option and investigations were undertaken by visiting a number of schools that had the system in place to identify how well the system worked, particularly its integration with our Student information system TASS.

Following extensive mapping out of our systems and the processes in Schoolbox, the product was launched to staff incrementally with a goal of having an extensive implementation across multiple campuses by January 2019. Staff spent the latter half of 2017 preparing for introduction to students in January 2018 and communication systems, particularly with staff, were further refined. The Schoolbox product was branded with the name Compass.

Next Step Survey 2017

In 2017, 60.6% of young people who completed Year 12 at King's Christian College in 2016 continued in some recognised form of education and training in the year after they left school. The most common study destination was Bachelor Degree (44.4%).

The combined VET study destinations accounted for 16.2% of respondents, including 9.1% in campus-based VET programs, with 7.1% of Year 12 completers entering programs at Certificate IV level or higher.

7.1% commenced employment-based training, either as an apprentice (5.1%) or trainee (2.0%).

In addition to the above study destinations, a further 13.1% of respondents from this school deferred a tertiary offer in 2017 (deferrers are included in their current destination).

39.4% did not enter post-school education or training, and were either employed (32.3%), seeking work (6.1%) or not in the labour force, education or training (1.0%).

There are a range of differences between and within school, regional and statewide destinations. Care should be taken when interpreting comparative data as the findings may relate to groups of different sizes.