History:
The Josephite Sisters established Holy Child School, Dallas, in 1965. The Josephite ethos of pastoral care and community involvement are the hallmark of the Holy Child community.
Holy Child School is part of the Dallas parish, which serves the suburbs of Coolaroo, Meadow Heights, Dallas, Upfield, Campbellfield and parts of Broadmeadows.
Early in 2015 we celebrated 50 years, our silver jubilee, marking a significant milestone in our parish history.
The buildings have been regularly upgraded and have been maintained over the years. The school has completed the construction of a shared parish foyer and school multi-purpose hall. This was followed by the construction and renovation of a new senior classroom block, funded under Building the Education Revolution (BER), which caters for 21st century, student-centred learning approaches.
These improvements were complemented by the installation of a new garden, play environment and junior adventure playground.
Description:
The school serves a community whose numbers are drawn predominantly from a lower socioeconomic status background (SES 82). Four years ago 77.9% of families were eligible to receive the Camps, Sports and Excursions Fund (CSEF) but this has increased to 87.3%.
The school enrolment data reports that 60.3% of families are unemployed, an increase of 2.56%, and that 39.7% of families are employed in the unskilled sector, as machine operators and labourers, a decrease of 0.1%. While skilled employment has increased to 20.7% of our community (enrolment data).
The school community is culturally diverse with students originating from 12 different countries. The largest ethnic family groups are from Iraq 65.1% and Vietnam 10.8%.
The school plays an important role in making its facilities available to the Chaldean Catholic Rite community and cultural-based groups. These school groups focus on spiritual and/or academic development of the students (curriculum and mother tongue language maintenance).
Features:
Partnerships are very important at Holy Child. We continue to partner with four other schools in the Pentagonal Collective, working with Melbourne 蜜桃视频 Catholic Schools (蜜桃视频) to improve Mathematics across all schools.
We also worked in partnership with The Edge an alliance between Banksia Garden鈥檚 Community Education Centre, Homestead Community and Learning Centre, Broadmeadows Valley Primary School, Good Samaritan Primary School. The Edge is working across sectors in an exciting partnership to transform lives and build stronger communities by working together, empowering families and staff, and deepening social connection to improve the quality of life for local residents.
We also continued our partnership with the Australian Catholic University, hosting Pre-Service Teacher (PST) and providing both workshops and classroom experiences. These initiatives support the positive learning of our children, opportunities for staff to share their expertise and demonstrate for our families that education is life-long.