Page 5206 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 27 October 2010
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students to have one-to-one support over 13 weeks. This program further develops their early number concepts. It has helped them to gain much-needed confidence in their approach to mathematics.
St Michael’s primary school in Kaleen has been striving to align their home reading program with contemporary practice. Reading at home is an essential component of the holistic reading program at the school. It provides students with extended practice and engagement in comprehending texts they want to read. Home reading supports students’ reading development and fosters a positive home-school partnership.
The entire home reading stock of the school was organised and sorted into book boxes in classrooms. Borrowing systems were established and a reading wall is used to track the borrowing of text. Children in years 4 to 6 record their home reading experience and progress online via an interactive MyWiki.
The MCEECDYA biennial educational forum was held on Friday, 15 October 2010. The forum brought together over 300 of Australia’s educational leaders and practitioners from all jurisdictions and sectors for a range of highly engaging interactive presentations and discussions. It provided a platform for considering schooling for tomorrow.
The forum provided an excellent opportunity to showcase ACT literacy and numeracy national partnership schools, with two ACT schools chosen out of 18 nationally to represent best practice across Australia. These programs, Good Shepherd’s numeracy program and the literacy and numeracy field officer program operating out of Macgregor primary school, give us an insight into how ACT students achieve the results they do.
In conclusion, in terms of NAPLAN results, the results speak for themselves. ACT schools are delivering education of the highest standards. And in terms of what lies behind these results, we see a rich and diverse range of strategies taken by teachers and schools across this city, delivered with great enthusiasm, to nurture, educate and inspire our students to create the foundation for learning. This has been and continues to be a tremendous effort and an opportunity for working collaboratively on a broad range of reforms to improve literacy and numeracy achievement for all ACT students. I urge the Assembly to support the motion.
MR DOSZPOT (Brindabella) (5.31): In light of the fact that the 2010 NAPLAN scores were released on 10 September, the timing of Mr Hargreaves’s motion is somewhat belated. In fact, it has the feel of someone who has arrived at a party that has already long ago finished. That said, if we were to have a motion on NAPLAN, credit should go to the parents and the teachers in our territory but, more so, our students should be congratulated on their hard work and dedication to their studies. We should not be just noting their collective results, as this motion proposes.
Yet what we have here is another attempt by ACT Labor to force the Assembly to give it a pat on the back for an unearned job well done. This is gratuitous and an elder statesman of Mr Hargreaves’s stature should know better than to be drawn into such cynical matters. Again, we see another ACT Labor exercise in politicising our public service through casual equivocation of terms.
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