Assistant Principal-range 1

Location: Melbourne | Eastern Metropolitan

Job type: Full time / From 27/01/2025

Organisation: Schools (Government)

**Salary**: Salary not specified

Occupation: Teacher

Reference: 1443988

**Location Profile**:
Toorak Primary School was founded in 1890 and is committed to providing a holistic approach to learning where the academic, physical, social, emotional and psychological needs of all children are taken into account.

We provide a dynamic learning environment that engages and inspires students to achieve their personal best in an atmosphere of mutual respect and cooperation. We continually improve procedures and practices at Toorak Primary School so that every child has the opportunity to succeed.

The buildings and grounds at Toorak Primary School have been fully refurbished to provide an attractive, inviting learning environment for all students. Wider community members also utilise the array of facilities on offer at Toorak Primary School. Our inner-city school has an enrolment of approximately 470 students with 22 classes. Single levels operate across the school from foundation through to grade 6 where possible. Four specialist classes including French, Physical Education, Music and Visual and Performing Arts are offered to all students throughout the year. Other languages available at Toorak Primary School include German and Swedish through external providers. As part of the Performing and Visual Arts Programs, a school production is staged every second year with a musical production, alternating with a school Art Show.

Teaching at Toorak Primary School is grounded in educational research and cognitive science. We ensure that students make the most of their time on task by maximizing the quality of each learning moment. Our approach focuses on building each learner's brain through explicit direct instruction, repetition, teacher fidelity, and purposeful engagement. Committed to evidence-based decision-making, TPS draws on Rosenshine's research to design and map our curriculum, select effective instructional strategies, and structure lessons with precision.

We employ explicit teaching, delivering new material in manageable steps, along with guided practice, teacher modelling, questioning, and review and retrieval practices. These are whole-school strategies that ensure all students make steady progress in their learning journey.

Our reading instruction is comprehensive, acknowledging that teaching reading goes beyond phonics. It is supported by phonological awareness, reading fluency, vocabulary development, and comprehension, ensuring that our curriculum fosters student fluency in all essential components.

At TPS, instructional routines are crucial. We prioritize teaching first, reducing cognitive load, providing ample opportunities for practice, and focusing on efficient and effective learning. As educators, we recognize that knowledge stored in long-term memory is active and can be applied flexibly and effortlessly across a range of contexts. At TPS, knowledge is what students think with. With this in mind, we are dedicated to a knowledge-rich curriculum, ensuring that foundational, enabling, and problem-solving knowledge is strategically developed as students progress through each stage of their education.

Our professional learning program is designed to build professional practice, knowledge, capacity and understanding of curriculum. We recognise that teaching is an incredibly complex profession and that to meet the needs of students, we require ongoing opportunities for practice improvement. At Toorak Primary School, we are also committed to developing a strong and vibrant professional learning culture, where all teachers are given the opportunity to learn and grow together. Built on a foundation of trust, our teachers have opportunities to observe and coach one another, with the view to provide the best possible education for a diverse student community.

Our school's Behaviour Management approach is based on the School Wide Positive Behaviour framework and Restorative Practices.

The successful applicant needs to exemplify the DET values and the school's values of respect, kindness, responsibility, honesty and friendship, and be prepared to be actively involved in a supportive and growth mindset culture.

**Selection Criteria**:
**SC 1 Educational Leadership**
- Outstanding capacity for visionary and exemplary educational leadership of a school
- Highly developed skills in leading and managing change including the leadership of others in the process of change.

**SC 2 Financial, Managerial and Administrative Ability**
- Outstanding financial, organisational and resource management skills.

**SC 3 Planning, Policy and Program Development and Review**
- Exemplary values appropriate to the development of student learning with a demonstrated capacity to achieve high quality student outcomes
- Demonstrated ability to implement Department policies to a high level.
- An understanding of