From our Principal

Welcome back to 2023! A particularly warm welcome to our Year Seven students and any beginning students from Years 8 to 12, as well as their parents and carers to our school community. Welcoming the Year 7s to the Harcombe Centre each year is truly an amazing scene; a rousing reception and a rite of passage at MRC.  

To those of you new to Catholic Education, I wonder what it is you desire for your child? Is it an “education in the fullness of humanity” that you and your child might be looking for? To do this statement any justice, we would need some time to explore in another edition of The Star. Please be assured that I will come back to this throughout the year.  

Personally, I am so pleased to be returning to MRC after experiencing my Renewal and Long Service Leave in 2022. Twenty-two years of consecutive work meant that it was needed. Renewal Leave is for experienced Principals after their seventh year. For mine, I move into year number eleven in the role. Taking a break is probably not something I do well naturally, but am so pleased to have had the opportunity.  

Firstly, I would like to thank Mr Noel Nethery for accepting the position of Acting Principal for 2022. I have appreciated his willingness to keep the school moving forward during this time. Moving from Townsville to Burnie is one of significance, and again, was appreciated. 

On Tuesday night we celebrated the Evening of Excellence. Overall, our 2022 Senior College students performed very well, yielding the following results:  

From our cohort of 82 students, 48 students completed an ATAR, which is 58.5% of the cohort. From the ATAR results:  

• 58.3% of our students received an ATAR of 80 or better, which is in top the 20% nationally; 

• 35.5% of our students received an ATAR of better than 90, which is in the top 10% nationally; 
• Three of our students were acknowledged as achieving a tertiary entrance score in the top 100 students statewide, in Kasuni Indralal with a 99.75 ATAR; Raina Zhao with a 99.65 ATAR; and Eimear Anderson with a 98.45 ATAR.  
• Both Kasuni and Raina achieved an ATAR of better than 99.5 and received the TASC Outstanding Achievement Award.  
• Callum Dobbie and Shania Saward were also presented with their Outstanding VET Awards in Hobart last week. Other recipients included Talon Best and Taylor Nash who were unable to attend in person to receive their VET Awards. Special thanks to our staff, Mr Wayne Gale and Mrs Fiona Hamilton who attended the TASC awards event in Hobart last week. 

Further details relating to the award recipients, as well as highlighting outstanding individual efforts, are included below.  

Despite the outstanding academic results, we need to keep moving forward and continue to advance our practices, so they become more consistent with lower variance throughout the College. This is ambitious, but as a College, we are in the process of building an explicit improvement agenda over the next three years, with the staff working with College leadership to codesign.  

With confidence, I believe that students will benefit from this work, which has both curriculum and instructional elements. We are reviewing our curriculum in line with the Australian Curriculum version 9, as well as providing staff with innovative instructional, professional learning opportunities. Mrs Emily Sass, and our newly appointed Director of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Miss Bobbi-Jo Bailey, look forward to sharing more in this area with you throughout the year. 

I look forward to continuing to communicate with you all throughout the year around the new innovations and initiatives being brought to the College in 2023. The College must continue to be future focused to ensure the needs of all 828 students who attend, as well as those to come, have the best opportunities available.  

In partnership  

Mr Gregg Sharman 

Principal 

MRC Board Membership 

Anyone interested in becoming a member of the College Board, please express your interest to: 

Jennine Williams 

PA to the Principal 

Tel: (03) 6432 7612 

Email:  principal@mrc.tas.edu.au 

Evening of Excellence 2022