Over the past 12 months I have referred on a number of occasions to the importance of the school, parent (and Church) partnership in education. As a Christian school, GPCC holds the belief that God sets children in families as the designed place for them to grow and be nurtured until such time as they can stand alone and head off to make their own life.

We know that much secular research points to the value of a nurturing home in the development of a child and when a school and a home commit together to support a child, it creates a powerful force for the good of the child. As Christians, we also believe in the community of the Church as another God-ordained institution that supports both home and school in this task.

Through the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been wonderful to see school and home working together to keep the daily lives of our children stable and focused on learning and growing – not on infection. As we begin the return to all students being back at school, we do not want to fail to acknowledge that we have needed each other, and we still do. You have done so much to support our efforts to keep learning going, for which we are very grateful.

We are now looking at how to incorporate what we have learnt as teachers into our daily approach to teaching going forward and I do not want to leave out the possibility of a closer partnership together with you as parents. We will keep you informed of our work and how you can partner with us in it.

Part of this involves good communication, and some months ago we employed Mr Brendan Wood as our Marketing and Community Relations Manager. He has done excellent work to address some deficiencies in our ability to communicate what we are doing at school with you and the wider community. I hope you are enjoying the Facebook page through which we are trying to share with you exciting activities and events in the life of our school.

As part of this improvement, we are launching our new website this week (www.gpcc.nsw.edu.au). We see it primarily as a marketing tool for prospective families, but I trust you will also see it as a way of learning more about your school and what happens here. Websites remain works in progress so we will be changing content and developing it as we go forward, but I encourage you to go and have a look at it.

We have a number of volunteer parents who also run class-based Facebook pages for us and I really appreciate the great work they do in providing another channel of partnership between school and home and amongst clusters of families. We are a large community of well over 600 families, so we need to work at how to partner together well. But it is happening, and these media platforms help in that.

Phillip Nash

Principal