End of Term 3

What a jam-packed term we have had! There is always something going on in classes across the school. We have had wonderful school camps, amazing excursions and fabulous visiting groups to our school. Only this week we had a large python as part of a wildlife visit!

Don’t forget, students will be dismissed at 2:30pm today. Book your child into TeamKids if you are not able to be here on time.
I look forward to seeing everyone back at school on Monday 5^th October for our final Term this year. Is it just me or has this year raced by?

Student Enrolments, Students Leaving.

I am currently in the midst of planning for next year – class allocations, staffing etc. To do this accurately, I need to know of new students who will enrol, as well students who may transfer to another school.

If your child is not in Grade 6 and will be leaving Birralee to move to another primary school, please email birralee.ps@education.vic.gov.au asap so we can adjust our online planner for 2027. State your child's name and the school that they will be transferring to. 

Keeping our Children Safe

I was fortunate to grow up in an era where my free time after school and on weekends consisted of riding my bike for hours, reading, playing or listening to music, building billy carts, kicking a footy with my friends, spending time in my tree house, or wandering along a weeping willow-lined, meandering creek. Even TV did not start until 5:00pm at night – so we could not be glued to a TV screen all day long - we became very self-reliant.

Alas, parenting is not the same it once was, dangers lurk in many places in our online world, and parents must be vigilant to a degree they have never had to before.

The article below by Kirra Pendergast makes for sober reading and has some very sound advice:

“You Cannot Mark Your Own Homework” What Australia Just Demanded of Roblox - Kirra Pendergast

If you have a young gamer in your house, you will know the occasional laughter and murmur of a conversation happening through a headset from the next room. You think to yourself, good, they’re happy, they’re safe, they’re only playing a game.

When it comes to Roblox, it has not been only a game for quite some time now. It is a social recreation platform that looks more like a massive online shopping centre than a game. In fact, when I have spoken about it in public, I often use the analogy of someone dropping a shopping centre into the middle of a primary/elementary school. Forums, profiles, chat, virtual rooms, and millions of experiences built by everyday strangers. Today it was announced that eSafety has secured a court-enforceable undertaking from Roblox after its own testing found that adults could still reach young Australian children on the platform, more than a year after Roblox publicly committed to fixing exactly that.

eSafety has found that adults could send connection requests to young children they did not know, without parental consent. That children and adults could see and respond to each other’s posts in forums sitting outside the games themselves. Kids' friend lists are sometimes visible to anyone, and their profile names, avatars, connections, and interests are open, with no privacy at all.

Roughly 1.7 million young Australians use Roblox. It is the second most popular game among children in this country and a struggle for Australian parents to understand and “control”. It is also the platform that most often falls victim to “but I am the only kid that is not allowed to use it” arguments at home.

So Roblox has three months, and within that period of time Roblox must:

• Stop adults contacting children they don’t know without parental consent and be able to prove it is doing so.
• Make children’s accounts private by default.
• Build clearer reporting pathways, and actually tell users what happened to their complaint, which often does not happen.
• Appoint an independent third-party auditor to test whether its safety measures, especially its age-estimation technology, genuinely work.

This is the first time the Online Safety Act has used its powers to require third-party auditing, and Commissioner Julie Inman Grant’s framing was perfect when she stated that Roblox “cannot mark their own homework.” If Roblox doesn’t deliver, eSafety can bring a case to the Federal Court.

For years, the standard platform response to a safeguarding failure has been an announcement. We’ve introduced new tools. We’ve added parental controls. We take this seriously. And parents, exhausted and unqualified to audit a global tech company, have had to take that on faith. I have a very big problem with the term parental “controls” as it pushes accountability from the platforms to the parents which is completely unfair.

This course of action from the eSafety Commissioner will quietly dismantle that arrangement, in four ways.

It puts the burden on Roblox, with the requirement that they implement tools that switch to safety by default, not on a parent finding the right toggle buried four menus deep, and not on a ten-year-old knowing to report an adult who has been very patient and very kind to them.

It treats age assurance as necessary but not sufficient. You can guess a child’s age through all sorts of technology solutions and still leave the door open if the product around it lets adults browse, message and befriend kids. It demands evidence, not PR press releases. Independent testing of whether the controls actually hold is a non-negotiable. It also draws a line under a sentence I never want to hear from one of these platforms again “we introduced tools”. Introducing a tool is not the same as preventing a foreseeable harm; this is something that is used non-stop to avoid accountability, and enough is enough.

Tonight, please talk to your child if they are a Roblox user:

• Do not sit opposite them, sit beside them and go through their Roblox settings together.
• Check the different experiences they use within the platform, check the hashtags underneath and what they actually mean, paying particular attention to adult themes and do not trust the age rating - get your child to show you what happens within that particular experience.
• Check who can contact them, who can see their profile, what their friend list actually contains, and whether every name on it is someone they could point out in a school assembly.
• Make sure you child knows you are their safe space and that should immediately come to you with anything that they are not sure about. Especially if someone asks them to move off Roblox to another platform like Discord to chat.
• Then tell them if anyone online ever makes you feel special in a way that has to stay secret, that is the moment you come and tell me. You will never be in trouble.

For years, platforms have understood that the fastest way out of a regulation is to stand outside the category it names, so the one with a chat function calls itself a game, the one with a feed calls itself a messaging app, the one built on user-generated video calls itself an educational tool. Roblox calls itself a game; it is far from it, and it is definitely acting as a social network now, and for that reason it is subject to Australian Government rules.

What a platform calls itself has never been the question. What it does to harm, or if it facilitates harm towards a child, is what needs to be questioned.

Regulation is catching up, but conversation still gets there first.

Parents for a better childhood - For those who want to limit smartphone use

A huge amount of pressure comes from children who tell their parents that they ‘must’ have a smartphone. A group which originally began in the USA, to limit smartphone use for our young people, now has a counterpart in Australia. The following article describes the Australian program:

Wait Mate started with a group of parents asking the same question many families are asking: does a smartphone really need to be part of childhood this early? The more we talked, the more we realised we weren’t alone. Inspired by Wait Until 8th in the USA, we created an Australian not-for-profit movement to help parents and carers wait as long as possible before giving their kids a smartphone. By connecting families in the same school year group, the pressure no longer sits with one parent or one child. 

We believe childhood should be shaped by real people, real experiences and real-world connection before smartphones. Waiting will look different for every family. Our role is to make it easier to do together. Wait Mate Foundation Limited is a not-for-profit registered with the ACNC. www.waitmate.org.au/

PFA News

Click here to read the latest PFA newsletter.



Ashley Ryan
PRINCIPAL

Quote of the Week
“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” Martin Luther King Jr.

Word of the Week
Congratulations (noun-plural)a message congratulating somebody (= saying that you are happy about their good luck or success)
Etymology ‘congratulations’ comes from the Latin verb congratulari, which breaks down into two parts:

• con-, meaning ‘together’ or ‘with’
• gratulari, meaning ‘to express joy’ (gratulari’s parent word gratus also gave us ‘grateful’, ‘gratitude’ and ‘grace’).

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We have various tutors and organisations who provide private tuition and programs before, during or after school. New programs are advertised via flyers or in the community news section of the newsletter. Please contact the event organiser to enrol your child.

Name	Program	Contact
Lala Music	Music lessons and band for grade 3 - 6	Olivia 0419 131 868 lalamusic2@yahoo.com.au
Jill Scholfield	Piano	0401 972 664 Jill
Violin Lessons	Violin	0413 207 689 trentbunston@gmail.com Trent
Kelly Sports	Multi Sports Basketball	gary@kellysports.com.au kellysports.com.au/events Gary Hoskin
Slamin Tennis	Tennis	0403 129 648 https://slamin.com.au/ Vicky
Sporty Stars	Multi Sports	0422 043 853 info@sportystars.com.au Russ
Team Kids	Out of school hours care	1300 035 000 https://teamkids.com.au/
Digimaker	Coding	https://www.digimaker.com.au/enrol
Chess Education	Chess Club	info@chesseducation.com.au Nick
Bricks 4 Kidz	Lego building	0402 945 599 hychong@bricks4kidz.com Bricks4kidz.com.au

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Lunch orders are available for lunch (12:50pm). Orders can be placed in advance and need to be in by 9:00am for same day processing. To place an order download the Qkr! App.

Click here for instructions on how to download and use Qkr!

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Please take note of our upcoming events. Check back regularly for updates.

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