2022 Senior Outcomes

At the start of 2022, the Year 12 cohort chose the phrase, ‘You Got This’, as their inspiration for the year ahead. As a cohort they certainly embraced this approach to their academic studies as they coped with the challenges of a delayed start to the school year, and the impact of the flood to our local community. Despite this initial unexpected turn of events, our 2022 Year 12 graduands showed themselves to be caring, confident, creative and connected young women as they worked together to achieve their full potential.

Our teachers walk alongside the Year 12s to expertly prepare the students for the internal, mock and external assessments. The St Aidan’s teachers continue to be involved in the QCAA quality assurance processes with 6 teachers appointed as Confirmers and 2 Lead Confirmers, 6 teachers as Endorsers, 13 teachers as External assessment markers, and 3 teachers involved in writing and scrutiny panels for the external assessments. This involvement with QCAA ensures that we are constantly building expertise to provide a quality academic program for the students.

Academic achievement for the graduands of St Aidan’s was celebrated through their completion of QCAA General and Applied subjects, as well as vocational qualifications including the Diploma of Business and Certificate II or III courses. Each of these achievements contribute towards the students QCE and build their portfolio of knowledge and skills for future endeavours. The ATAR provides one mechanism for students to enter tertiary courses and is provided as a notional percentile rank, with a high of 99.95 representing performance in the top .05% of students in the state. Increments of .05 separating ATARs, result in a finer grained measure of student achievement.

For the graduating class of 2022, a key focus was remaining focused on the three internal assessments so that they were able achieve as many subject marks as possible prior to the external assessment. For Maths and Science subjects, internal assessment marks were worth 50% of the overall subject result. For all other subjects, the internal assessments contributed 75% to the subject result. Three internal assessments combined with one external assessment to calculate their Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR).

Our 2022 Year 12 students are to be congratulated on their remarkable achievement. Their results reflect the hard work and dedication of the 2022 cohort and the quality and professionalism of the teaching staff and educational experience offered at St Aidan’s.

Mrs Jo Butterworth Dean of Studies BSc (App-HMSEd), MACEL

97% of St Aidan’s senior cohort was ATAR eligible.Actual performance may be higher, as the small number of students who did not release data to the school have been included as having achieved below 80.

2022 ATAR Results

St Aidan’s continues to be one of the top performing independent schools in Queensland.

MEDIAN ATAR HIGHEST ATAR 99.90

94.15 achieved by 2 students

ATAR OF

12% OF STUDENTS

ATAR OF + 95

44% OF STUDENTS

7 students achieved Perfect Scores 100/100

+ 99 + 98

22% OF STUDENTS

A’s

ATAR OF + 90

ATAR OF 53 students achieved straight A’s in all 5 subjects

77% OF STUDENTS

100% of all students achieved a QCE (Queensland Certificate of Education)

Data Consent - Australian Tertiary Admission Ranks (ATAR) are calculated and released by the Queensland Tertiary Admissions Centre (QTAC). The decision for students to share their ATAR result with their schools is optional and St Aidan’s only has access to the individual ATARs of our Year 12 students where consent has been granted by those students when registering in the ATAR Portal. The St Aidan’s class of 2022 was a cohort of 108 students, 103 were ATAR eligible.

2022 started out with a bang as we invited Nick Earls to be our inaugural Writer in Residence. Nick joined us for a full week at the start of Term 1, helping to mentor both staff and students in the craft of writing. The Year 9 students welcomed Nick into their classrooms as they completed workshop activities to help improve their narrative writing. We held an Open Door at lunch where students from Years 7-12 could hear Nick speak on his writing process; teachers from both the Junior and Senior School completed a professional development workshop with him, and we ran a Flash Fiction competition for students who wrote short stories of 50 words or less. We are very grateful for the work that Nick put in to help us improve our capacity to deliver meaningful instruction to ultimately see growth in our students’ confidence to write creatively.

We have continued to build on our foundations of delivering engaging and thought-provoking curriculum and pedagogy to strengthen student independence and confidence in all literary avenues. A significant part of our pedagogical reflection has included the continuation of our research project with The University of Queensland which began last year and focuses on developing agentic learners through feedback processes. This included trialling new approaches to delivering feedback to students, such as staggered drafting, ‘next step’ directives to improve student agency and delivering feedback using different technological tools.

Finally, we continued to refresh the texts studied in order to meet students’ needs and provide them with opportunities to connect with representations of people, times and places that resonate with them in some way. This year saw the introduction of Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey in Year 10 English, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak in Year 11 English and the film Lion in Essential English. We are looking forward to introducing more new texts in 2023.

As we opened the year by welcoming Nick Earls into the St Aidan’s community, I would like to finish with a quote from him: “The writing can be its own reward, as you discover more things that you can do. It counts a lot, though, when a story connects with a reader and they take the time to tell me about it.” We hope that our English students, at some point in the year, have felt rewarded by the process of their own writing or have felt connected to the writing of an author in some way, expressing their thoughts with creativity and confidence.

Mrs Samantha Doig Head of Faculty BEd, BArts

Science engineering and the technologies influence every aspect of modern life. Knowledge of science and engineering is required to engage with major public policy issues as well as make informed decisions, such as selecting alternative medical treatments, or determining how to invest public funds for water supply and renewable energy sources.

Our experience with the pandemic has highlighted the importance of science as a human endeavour and brought to the forefront the power of collaboration and creative thinking skills in solving global problems. Our students have experienced first-hand the relevance of science through constant exposure to media claims and the bombardment of daily statistics. The questions below provide some insight into the ways in which these scenarios have sparked learning discussions within the classroom:

• “How is the growth of online learning affecting students? Is it benefiting some while hindering others? How can we take this and different learning styles into account to create a system that benefits those with a variety of learning styles?”

• “What are the effects on the environment? Executives had to do a lot of travel for work prior to COVID-19. Companies have been revaluating how essential all that travel was. Did they really need to travel halfway across the country to meet with a client or would skyping have worked just as well?”

• “How effective are measures like social distancing, wearing masks, wearing gloves to combating the spread of COVID-19?

• “What are the long-term effects going to be? How can we get the real information and cut the spread of fake news on this virus? How will the COVID-19 virus affect us 5 years from now?”

The celebration of Science Week highlighted the creativity of our science educators with a series of activities relating to the 2022 Science Week theme – ‘Glass - more than meets the eye’. Students from Years 7-12 made kaleidoscopes and used the energy of the sun to etch wood. We used lasers to investigate mirror mazes and explore optical fibres in jelly.

Our Marie Curie Science Club explored scientific ideas in a low-stress, non-competitive environment that further fostered curiosity, imagination and creativity. Marie Curie Club is a hybrid space that encourages a deep engagement in science. Requiring just a curious mind, students explored invisible ink, edible organs, projectile rockets, iPhone amplifiers, and the powers of centrifugation. A highlight of the semester was the presentation of an award to St Aidan’s for our ongoing commitment to the UQ Science Ambassador Program over the last 18 years.

The Science Elective program undertaken in Years 9 and 10, in conjunction with the Physical Education program, offers students a multidisciplinary approach to STEM and Human Movements. Learners worked collaboratively to design, create and evaluate from a ‘big picture’ perspective. This enabled them to cross boundaries between disciplines and gain unique insights into their subject as they spent time working on problems that intersected two fields. For example, combining anatomy in HPE with robotics in physical sciences, or nutritional biochemistry with forensics science. This somewhat unconventional approach to learning encourages learners to be adaptable and to move past traditional subject specific boundaries, skills that are required in an ever-changing workforce.

Dr Ela Martin Acting of Head of Faculty BMedMD Sci, PhD (Medicine), GradDipT (Secondary)

2022 was a busy year for both students and teachers in the Mathematics faculty. Increasing student understanding and interest in the subject were the stimulus for many changes and new activities. Teachers focused on differentiation – tailoring the learning to meet students wherever they were on their learning journey and adjusting activities to encourage growth. This, combined with thoughtprovoking changes to the junior assessment guidelines, resulted in a new direction and focus for the year.

Foundational skills have been at the forefront of the junior classrooms. Teachers of junior classes heeded the words of Albert Einstein, ‘Having fun while learning is the best way to learn’ when they planned their classroom activities. A visit from World of Maths provided a fun opportunity for the students to learn mathematics through real-life examples. Interactive displays rewarded students for their successes as they ‘had a go’ at each activity. Students were required to complete a rich task – one that encouraged learners to think creatively, work logically, communicate ideas, synthesise results, analyse viewpoints, look for commonalities and evaluate findings. They designed and costed a suit made from Australian notes for their ‘filthy rich cashinova’ mathematics teacher. Gucci and Armani would have been proud of the results which were presented to their peers at the culmination of this brief. This was a fun introduction into what a Problem Solving and Modelling Task (PSMT) would look like in coming years.

Year 8 students were explicitly exposed to the processes involved in a PSMT as they designed a kennel for a particular breed of dog. They researched dimensions for their allocated breed and combined this with their knowledge of surface area and scale to determine the amount of paint required to finish the kennel. Linear Relationships were used by Year 9 students to investigate the rental costs of hiring a scooter while Year 10 students used plasticine to design a geometric sculpture that showcased the beauty of mathematics. The volume of the sculpture was used to cost material required to construct a one metre scaled version of the original model. Whirlybirds were also dropped en masse by the Year 10 cohort to investigate how wing length affects flight time.

Mr Joel Speranza Head of Faculty BEd (Business and Mathematics)