Year in Review 2021

YEAR IN REVIEW

Secondary School of the Year (Government)

Overall Australian School of the Year

Outstanding Secondary Teacher Award

Strong relationships kept us together in 2021 What holds a school together when its students and staff are spread to the four winds by a pandemic? What keeps us learning and attending classes remotely when we’re working from a screen at our bedroom desk or kitchen table? In the past year we have found the answer: not just our powerful infrastructure and detailed preparations but strong relationships born of respect, friendship and kindness. That last quality – kindness – which we have done so much to encourage in the past few years, helped us overcome the exhaustion and mental fatigue of a second year of lockdown.

In this 2021 Year In Review, you will see how the school kept going strongly to achieve strong academic results, keep creating great art, develop students’ life skills through extracurricular activities and competitions, and look after each other. In a consequential year for global warming, we continued to cut our emissions and take responsibility for the future of our community and planet.

I want to thank everyone at the college for their efforts throughout the year: students, teachers, support staff, our school council members, and of course the parents who assumed even greater responsibilities overseeing remote learning at home.

As you will see in this Year In Review, our work culminated, in winning several highly prestigious awards including Best School in Australia.

Whether you are continuing on at the school next year, or joining our alumni, we hope you will keep giving us your support, which we greatly appreciate. Here’s to an even better 2022.

Steven Cook Foundation Principal Oona Nicolson School Council President

Education Perfect Secondary School of the Year (Government)

Tes Australian School of the Year

SUPPORTING EACH OTHER

He rald Sun/Sunday He rald Sun (Me lbourne , Australia) - Se p te mbe r 8, 2021 - p age 21 September 8, 2021 | Herald Sun/Sunday Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia) | Melbourne, Australia | Pag e 21

Care packs make the news He rald Sun/Sunday He rald Sun (Me lbourne , Australia) - Se p te mbe r 8, 2021 - p age 21 September 8, 2021 | Herald Sun/Sunday Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia) | Melbourne, Australia | Pag e 21

We went to extra lengths this year to keep our VCE and IB squads connected and positive.

Bernard and Sam from our café hand delivered Care Packs containing the traditional year12 rugby top and other gifts, including a personalised handwritten letter from teachers to students. We had marvellous feedback and two of our senior students – Isabella Flood and Ben Collis – made the pages of the Herald-Sun telling the story.

© Copyrig ht 2021 Nationwide News Pty Limited. All rig hts reserved.

Buddies Program Starting high school can be daunting but the buddy program makes the transition from junior school to high school easier and more fun. In 2021, year10 students were in charge of running activities and each year-10 leader was paired with a group of year-7 buddies to undertake fun activities. There was plenty of chatter and fun as everyone got to know each other. The Buddy Program was a great success and a lovely illustration of caring between students.

Helping families cope with lockdown Lockdown was a reality for parents as well as students, so we reached out to give advice to parents who needed it. In August, Assistant Principal – Positive Education Tim Nolan hosted a well-attended zoom meeting with leading child psychology expert Michael Carr-Gregg to give parents advice about how to approach lockdown in as positive a frame of mind as possible. Top tips: be positive, set goals, practice kindness.

Respectful relationships 2021 was the year Australian women spoke out against sexual violence, and the calls for change came from our own female students. Schools had a duty to respond, and APC set aside time from the school calendar to promote respectful relationships discussions at all year levels.

Students of all genders had a big role to play.

Community Foods Club How do you help feed the community during lockdown when visiting homes isn’t allowed? By feeding its pets.

Community Foods Club is an APC Inspire club that uses food to reach out and give back to the community. In the past, students have made breakfasts and lunches and donated to EatUp, an organisation that donated food to low SES schools around Melbourne. It has made dinners for the Asylums Seekers Project and even made desserts for Father Bob. After a long brainstorm, the club partnered up with Pets of the Homeless to make dog treats for the pets of homeless and disadvantaged people in our community.

Special last fortnight for year-12s School resumed full-time in Term 4 after a year of repeated lockdowns, starting with our year-12 students. It was fantastic to have them back for the last fortnight of classes and the SWOTVAC, getting extra attention from their humancompany-starved teachers.

Our classrooms, corridors and outdoor recreation spaces were finally buzzing again. Thanks to Covid restrictions lifting in time, our year 12s even managed an award night party to make up for their cancelled formal.

Staying fit – one step at a time Our little community did its best to keep everyone fit during the lockdown, including through a challenge to see who could do the most measured steps during the month of September. We got some great pictures from people’s walks, interacting with nature in between online classes.

It was a lovely mood lifter and our staff have never looked so fit.

Our IT crew won easily.

THE SHOW GOES ON

Art Show The Art Show is always a highlight of the year at APC. This year it was held at our new campus, Studio 120. Once again the efforts of our parent and community led organising team made for an amazing show. One of the highlights this year was the inclusion of the art of our year-12 VCE and IB arts students.

Dance Show In May our 2021 Dance Show, ‘Constellar’ was performed at the Southbank Theatre.

Choreographed by Chimene Steele-Prior, ‘Constellar’ was about togetherness, and explored the philosophy that we are all connected and play a vital part in our complex world.

Lit Fest Like just about every writer’s festival and book launch in the world this year, our Lit Fest was held virtually. There was another stellar line up, featuring the writers Alice Bishop, Maria Tumarkin, Angie McMahon and the critic Declan Fry. Interviews were conducted by a collection of top readers from our senior years. One of our aims is to produce eager readers and maybe a great author or two.

Staff Art Show On a wintry Monday night in May members of the APC community gathered in the Gershwin Room at The Esplanade Hotel, St Kilda to celebrate the amazing artistic talent of our staff.

Sculpture, floral arrangements, photography, knitting, sewing, illustration and painting were amongst the arts showcased.

Even the principal chipped in with his own environmental themed digital production. Some terrific pieces were sold. We love the fact that APC is such a gifted artistic community.

House Athletics Covid restrictions relented enough to allow us to hold the college athletics carnival. This year’s athletics carnival was held on 17 May at Lakeside stadium.

It was a great day full of fierce competition with Freeman House taking first place ahead of Flannery and Winton. We had record participation from across all year levels and some notable performances from the likes of Honour Tobin, Emily Bond, Sam Beazley and Bronte Bass.

House Swimming So many events had to be cancelled this year that it’s easy to forget how close to normal things were in Term 1. In February we held our annual swimming carnival at MSAC, which was a lot of fun for everyone. The year-12 house captains did a great job encouraging house spirit, and the seniors were out in force as girl cops and boy robbers.

Freeman House took the points, while younger swimmers Jack Gonzalez (first place for every individual event in Y8) and Daniel Magasanik (first place for every individual event in Y9) emerged as big swimming prospects for the future.

Baseball champions After winning the local Interschool tournament in March, the Year 9 and 10 APC baseball team took part in the Southern Metropolitan Sports Regional Baseball Championships on 30 April. Against difficult competition the team performed well and finished with three wins and no losses including an exciting Grand Final victory. Caps off to our new regional champions!

INNOVATION – THE CHILD OF NECESSITY

Eden This year we planned to hold our long-planned musical Eden – wholly written and produced by APC. It’s a story about hope, connection and the challenges of our time, involving Bailey, a 14-year-old girl whose desperation to save her mother leads her into a journey of discovery and ultimately, of revolution.

Sadly last year it was postponed due to lockdowns, so this year we decided to produce a televised version as a practice run for its full theatrical release in March 2022. It ran on 22 November and you can watch it here.

Studio 120 At the start of Term 2 we opened our new campus at 120 Bay Street Port Melbourne. Called Studio 120, it is a first in public education: a dedicated inner city arts studio where students will develop their creative potential and innovation skills in painting, drawing, fabrics, design, makerspace and related disciplines. It’s a fantastic place of experimentation. Designed by chief creative at Six Degrees Architects, Simon O’Brien, it’s turning heads in the education world.

Green Power School APC’s Environmental Action Plan continues to make progress towards its goal of creating a regenerative, carbon negative, resource smart, zero waste school. In Term 4 we passed another milestone: ensuring that all of Albert Park College’s electricity usage is derived from renewable energy. APC is now powered 100 per cent by green energy, making coal emissions for electricity a thing of the past.

Getting even greener In lockdown we kept thinking about how when we return to school we might get even greener. ‘Waste’ is now a dirty word – we’re all about ‘resource recovery’. We now have waste stations that separate rubbish into five main categories.

Soft plastics are now being made into new items like play equipment and fence posts, the paper APC uses is made into recycled paper and all our food is composted into usable soil. The system includes: Compost (green), Soft Plastics (orange), Co-mingled Recycling (yellow), Landfill (red), Paper and Cardboard (blue). It’s been fantastic to see all students doing their best, changing their habits and helping make this an effective new system. Danks street also saw a makeover with new natives being planted to create a greener, more sustainable garden.

Rites of passage – online style Covid-19 made normal year-12 rights of passage difficult. Sadly our end of winter dip in the bay had to be cancelled because of public gathering rules, but naturally, nothing can stop senior students celebrating the end of formal classes. It comes naturally. One of the Maths Methods classes celebrated the final lesson of content for year 12 by holding a fancy dress Google Meet. Creative costumes included Batman, Santa, and a holiday maker. The lesson concluded with party poppers, whistles, and applause.

Library Internship One of the nicest things to happen at APC this year was our library internship program. Five students volunteered a full day to work behind the scenes of the Library, learning the dark arts of cataloguing, book purchasing, information management, reading metadata and of course working behind the lending desk. The interns selected new books from suppliers such as the Avenue bookshop, the Rotary Club of Albert Park and ePlatform, with each student injecting their own interests into our collection.

Climate action Lockdown didn’t halt global warming or stop our students doing something about it. Ella Simons of 9F represented Australia in the pre-COP26 conference in Milan, Youth4Climate. She took part in conferences, protests, workshopped with Greta Thunberg and presented at multiple talks, panels and summits during that time. She was the youngest delegate at the conference and her passionate call to world leaders to take action was published in The Guardian.

BIG VICTORIES

School of the year This year we achieved something amazing: being named Australian School of the Year at the Australian Education Awards, beating some of the best-known government and nongovernment schools in the country. At the same awards ceremony we won Secondary School of the Year (Government). And a few days before that VicSRC and the Department of Education awarded us Student Voice School of the Year. That we could win these awards after just eleven years is an extraordinary performance.

Outstanding teaching APC is blessed with fantastic teachers. This year our very own Rachael Gore was awarded the Outstanding Secondary Teacher Award at the Victorian Government’s Education Excellence Awards. Rachael, a leading teacher in the STEM fields for our IB and VCE students, is well known also as an enthusiastic participant in our positive education programs and extra-curricular activities like public speaking. Her win was a great personal triumph as well as an endorsement of our high demand, team-based learning culture.

Phenomenal maths results APC students reported phenomenal results in this year’s Australian Mathematics Trust annual mathematics competition.

All students taking advanced mathematics participated in this year’s competition, achieving 50 Distinctions and 2 High Distinctions. Our junior division outperformed the nation in every category of award. The future looks good for maths – a tribute to the teamwork and innovation of our great maths teachers.

Leadership in lockdown year Our student leaders are always fantastic. This year their efforts were recognised by the Victorian SRC in the Student Voice Extravaganza, where they made it to the top three in the state for Student Voice School of the Year. They were later crowned winners.

Gasworks Arts Park Victory In February, students, parents and community supporters won a battle to preserve APC’s right to use open space at Gasworks Arts Park as a recreation area at recess and lunch times. In a high-profile campaign that made the front page of The Age, the Herald-Sun, Channel 7, Channel 9, 3AW and 774 ABC, the college rallied hundreds of parents and residents to allay concerns about our use of the park. We’re now working cooperatively with the City of Port Phillip on a plan to protect the park into the future. It showed what power our school community has when we work together.

Film Award Success APC is becoming a byword for creativity. A highlight for the year was the film production by year-12 Johdi Ramsden-Mavric.

Her short film, ‘From What You Left Behind’, won the award for best cinematography at the International Teen Short Film Festival in Beijing, an award for the fiction category at the WCTE-PBS student film festival in Tennessee, as well as being screened at the Pinewood studios Lift-Off festival in London and The Youth Diversity Film Festival in Hollywood. Jodhi said: ‘We have such amazing media teachers and resources at APC and I strongly encourage other students to take advantage of this.’

Reading increases At APC we’re big on reading.

Our Library and English teachers have been promoting reading hard. Are we succeeding? By one measure we are. This year we smashed our Premiers’ Reading Challenge record, with 900 books compared to 597 last year. The Rotary Club of Albert Park once again generously provided $1 per book read (plus $5 per book read during Book Week) to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, producing a total of $988.

Girls F1 Racing Team wins more prizes!

Momentum, an F1 in Schools team consisting of Angel Malhotra, Saige Meacham, Miranda Vaz and Agnes McCallum worked exceptionally hard throughout 2021, making the National Finals of the competition representing APC and Victoria. They were extremely successful at this event taking out the Collaboration with Industry Award.

Rowing victories Our rowing team took advantage of breaks from lockdown during last summer to secure many medals. Special congratulations go to the year-10 boys who remained undefeated this summer season and secured the State Championships title at the end of February.

The Rowing Academy is growing at a very rapid rate and we took possession of some new boats too.