Newsletter from the Principal
Dear Parents & Guardians,
Hopefully your children are now back into life at school after their summer holidays and enjoying their time with us!
As you will be aware the College benefitted from multiple opportunities for feedback over the course of last year. ESF survey feedback from all members of our community, in addition to CIS/WASC feedback, has been very helpful in enabling us to articulate our Strategic School Development Plan 2018 – 2021. We have focused in particular on Teaching & Learning, Wellbeing, Technology,and Governance, Finance & Facilities. See below for the link. The Executive Summary will give you a flavour of our broad strategic objectives with more detail available in the subsequent pages for those interested. I look forward to reporting back to you on our progress towards our strategic objectives in future communications.
As you will have seen from Vice Principal Paul Hoang’s communication recently, we received another outstanding set of IGCSE results. I am sure you will join me in congratulating our Year 12 students on their success. In particular we would like to acknowledge and congratulate Eugene Yuet Chee Lau who has received the CAIE (Cambridge) Learner Award for being “Top in Hong Kong” for both CAIE IGCSE Additional Mathematics and CAIE IGCSE Coordinated Sciences (Double Award). The Senior School hosted our Year 12 Celebration Evening this week and took the opportunity to acknowledge these successes as well as consider the opportunities and responsibilities that will come with the remaining two years at Sha Tin College for our Year 12 students. The future certainly looks bright!
Earlier this week your children may have shared with you that as a College we watched the documentary film “Angst” and then hosted tutor group discussions about the impact of anxiety and strategies to deal with it. With a strong focus on Wellbeing, as you will note from our Strategic School Development Plan, I would like to thank our PTSA for their support in funding this initiative and for enabling us to start these important discussions with our students. We are looking forward to welcoming over 100 families to the parent showing of the documentary film this evening.
Our Senior School families may also have heard that we received our Occupation Permit for our new building and have been busily moving into the new spaces this week. We have been able to add a bespoke space for our senior students to allow group collaboration as well as private study. The students can now work alongside our Guidance and Higher Education teams enabling ease of access and also providing a great space for our regular university visitors. The space also has an additional Café which will take pressure off our other catering facilities.
On the fourth floor, our new Learning Support Centre also now has six small classroom spaces in addition to small group meeting and therapy spaces. This floor also has four additional classrooms increasing our overall classroom capacity. As I mentioned in my last communication, the College has multiple spaces available for rental including excellent sports facilities and multi-purpose spaces. Anyone interested in facility rental should contact our Business Manager for further details.
We have been working with our PTSA and Student Council over the course of last year on the Sha Tin College uniform. We have decided to change supplier and so as our current stocks run low we will transition to our new supplier for winter uniform. For this current academic year uniform will still be available for purchase directly from the College. From next August we will move uniform sales to an online platform, which will provide website information about the uniform, including a size guide. There will also be a delivery option, a returns process, and a direct purchase option at their store in Lai Chi Kok. We don’t anticipate any notable increase in the cost of uniform but we are confident that the new system will provide rigorous quality control as well as better design and fabric for our uniform. Based on feedback from our girls this change has also given us the opportunity to change the design of the ‘skort’, which has received very positive feedback from our Student Council!
As we look towards October I am sure families are gearing up for another exciting CAS Week extravaganza. Mr. Morgan has dusted off the stccasweek Instagram account so be sure to follow all of our great learning opportunities and adventures there. We are also hosting one of the ESF Music Concerts next Wednesday 19th Sept, and of course everyone is welcome. Swim Gala is also not too far off, and while we hope for good weather, our House Teams are gearing up for another great College community event.
If you would like to follow life at Sha Tin College more closely please follow our Twitter, Instagram and Facebook posts!
Kind regards and a Happy Mid-Autumn Festival when it comes.
Carol Larkin
Principal – Sha Tin College
Strategic School Development Plan: https://shatincollege.edu.hk/strategic-school-development-plan-2018-2021
Our new Senior School Centre
Y12 Celebration Evening
