Trinity Lutheran College Cotlew Street Campus

It's been a year since my husband and I made the difficult decision to leave this school. It's a lovely community and the teachers are beautiful. I will always value their care and the time they spent with my kids. 

I acknowledge I was treated badly by management on leaving, and it is true that soured my experience overall, but it is not the only reason I am leaving a negative review. My opinion is genuine and I feel like it's worth something to people who might be unsure about the value of private school over state school. 

I will use words from my child. We were chatting about his school experience this year at his new school. He told me he missed Trinity. I asked why and he told me it is because no one ever made him do much work, he only had to read individually with a teacher or teacher aid maybe once or twice a term and he got to use the ipads nearly every day. At his new school he has to read with a teacher twice weekly and do sight words weekly. He has to sit still and use manners. He nevers gets an ipad and only gets computers one a fortnight in STEM. He has to work hard and he doesn't get away with pretending to work. His class teacher reads aloud from a novel every day and he has to work hard to keep up with the story and they never did anything like that at Trinity. 

We've had such a vastly different experience since changing schools, he has made so much progress and there is so much involvement and accountability from the school in ensuring he progresses. Reports are detailed, we've had multiple teacher check ins and PT interviews. He is in multiple daily inclusion programs to catch him up from everything he missed while he was at Trinity. He is now reading and spelling at year level and is approaching year level for maths. He was totally overlooked at Trinity and we had no idea that he was so far behind. 
I acknowledge we did change to another private school and the fees are marginally higher. However Trinity is NOT inexpensive - fees for prep in the year we left were ~$9,200 and there were 28 children in our prep class! Trinity provides more of a catholic school quality of education but charges APS school fees. The marketing team will always say that a better experience at a different private school is because that school charges more and therefore can provide a higher quality of education. To me that demonstrates complete lack of accountability and makes me feel so much better about our decision to leave. If a private school is claiming that they are too under-resourced to ensure every child is reaching their potential then they either have to enrol fewer children or increase the fees. It's weak to say that you strive to provide the "best value" (= cheapest) APS education if that means children get left out or left behind. It's simply not good enough and amounts to misleading families. 
If you are vacillating between private or public I don't think there is much difference between Trinity and what you can expect at Benowa State or Bellevue Park. If you must choose an independent school go catholic - very similar quality but a quarter of the price.