The Year of the Youth continues to be celebrated in a variety of ways across the Northern Territory.  Schools are currently conducting “listening post activities”, where students thoughts and ideas about the Catholic Church are discussed and recorded. All Year 5 students across the Darwin area came together to celebrate and participate in Making Jesus Real, a fun day held at the cathedral. The Year of the Youth celebrations have also included a Diocese wide gathering of all student from Year 6 to Year 10 for a concert performance from Father Rob Galea. This was followed by variety of gatherings to celebrate Catholic Education Week.

                                

The biggest impact on primary schools in the north of the NT was Tropical Cyclone Marcus that struck Darwin and the surrounding areas earlier this year. The cyclone resulted in school closures and millions of dollars in damage. The most common area of damage that occurred to schools was power outages, water mains damage, fallen trees, damaged and torn shade sails, broken windows and damage to outside teaching areas. There was outstanding school community support in the recovery phase. Parents, teachers, students and staff from the Catholic Education Office all assisted in making the schools safe to reopen.

The start of the school year saw the opening of the first new Catholic Primary School in over two decades in the Northern Territory. Mother Teresa Catholic Primary School has opened in the suburb of Zuccoli. The current student enrolment from Transition to Year 2 is approximately 70 students.  The school plans to increase to nearly 200 students when the building is fully complete in 2019.

A unique aspect of the NT is that each of the Catholic Primary schools has a funded Data Informed Practitioner (DIP) working in their school. This coordinator oversees the data collation and analysis within their school. This DIP program is in its third year and continues to go from strength to strength. The coordinator also works with teachers to unpack their results and work alongside them to model best practice to cater for all the learning needs of students in their class. Each school has able to track student longitudinal greatly assisting the transfer of knowledge from teacher to teacher and year to year.

 Robotics is an area of curriculum that is currently a real hit across the Catholic Primary schools in the NT. With the support of the Catholic Education Office each school has been provided with training and resources to integrate robotics into their curriculum through the use of EV3, WeDo and Bee-Bot robotics. The units of work culminated in an interschool Robo Cup Challenge where students were able to show their newly acquired skills. 

All NT Primary Principals have recently been involved with two days of professional development about Work Place Law.  The professional development covered Unfair Dismissal, Due Process, Fair Work Australia, Bullying and Workplace Discriminations. The sessions were both informative and practical. The professional development provided a step by step guide for dealing with many situations that arise for principals on a day to day basis. Principals walked away certainly feeling more confident about how to deal with some of the challenging situation we face.