How to Support Your Child Under 16 with New Social Media Age Restrictions
From 10 December 2025, the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 will require social media platforms to:
· prevent children and young people under 16 from having a social media account
· deactivate or freeze existing accounts held by people under 16.
Delaying access to social media protects the health and wellbeing of young people and gives them extra time to build real world connections and digital literacy skills.
The responsibility will be on the social media platforms, not parents, carers, children or schools, to implement these new restrictions.
Most popular social media platforms will be age restricted. These include Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), Reddit and YouTube.
Messaging services and online games, as well as apps and platforms that support health and education, can still be used.
How to Help Under 16s Prepare for the Change
Parents and carers play an important role in supporting their children to be safe online.
To help get under 16s ready for the social media minimum age requirements, you can go to the eSafety website to learn more about the social media age restrictions and find tips on how to talk about social media age restrictions with young people.
What the Change Means for Our School
At our school, most age-restricted social media platforms are blocked for student use on the school network. Our school allows student access to YouTube in a logged-out state. However, this access is restricted so mature content cannot be viewed. To keep up to date about the new social media age restrictions, visit the eSafety website and subscribe to their newsletter.
End of Term Canteen Closure
Please be advised that December 12th will be the last day of Canteen operation for this year.
The Canteen will not be open in the last week of Term, 15th – 19th December, and students will be required to bring a packed lunch. Please also ensure to cancel and recurring Canteen orders for the last week of Term.
Library
In the library in Term 4 we have celebrated Banned Books Week and Halloween. During Banned Books Week we educated students on the reasons that a book may be banned or contested in schools and helped them have discussions around this. For Halloween the library ran a scavenger hunt for the students. There were about 40 students who participated.
As we get closer to the end of the year, Year 7 classes continue to display high levels of work in their library sessions. In each library lesson, the students read and then complete a journal entry on their book. These sessions help students increase their reading and writing comprehension skills and many are finishing a novel for the first time ever. I’m impressed with the work they’ve done this term and look forward to them finishing the program. I hope that this program will lead to an interest in reading for many students.
Students will be allowed to borrow books (maximum of 4) for the summer holidays in the last week of term.
Kate Cholich
Library Manager
This term our Year 7 literacy groups have been continuing with their class text ‘Coraline’ by Neil Gaiman. They follow along in the eBook while listening to the audiobook as a group, which allows the groups to engage fully with the story. Students will normally listen to a chapter per lesson and then together as a group summarise using quizzes as a fun way to convey their understanding. The groups have been diligently working on their reading booklets with exercises and activities. We have been exploring PEEL paragraph structure, Parts of Speech and connecting overarching concepts such as using previous chapters. The students are engaging with the story by asking questions and being able to accurately recall previous chapters. They are also applying themselves when working through their booklets and are on track to finish before the end of the year!
Lahana Sexton & Sam Wheaton
Literary Officers