HUNTER schools who made “above average gains” in their NAPLAN results have pointed to teacher development and personalised programs as factors that contributed to their improved academic performance.
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The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) will update the My School website on Wednesday to reflect each school's performance in the NAPLAN tests last May.
ACARA identified four Hunter schools – Hamilton North Public, Tea Gardens Public, Hunter Valley Grammar at Ashtonfield and St James’ Primary at Muswellbrook – as having made “substantially above average gain in their NAPLAN results as students progress from year three to five and from year seven to year nine”.
Hamilton North relieving principal Kelly Deakin said she was “very proud” of the school’s year five students from 2015, who had improved in both reading and numeracy since they were last tested in year three.
“I would not say that we’ve done anything different, but we do have a culture of striving – our school motto is be the best that you can be,” Ms Deakin said.
“We have a consistent focus on quality teacher professional learning. There’s lots of collaboration across learning stages and sharing ideas of best practice.”
Ms Deakin said the school also had a supportive parent community engaged with their children’s learning.
“We have very high expectations of student success, but we also focus on personalised learning and meeting the needs of students where they’re at.”
At the three other schools, year five students from 2015 made above average gains in numeracy compared to when they were in year three.
Tea Gardens principal Mark Clemson said he was “over the moon” with the results and pointed to a kindergarten to year two program called Targeting Early Numeracy as successfully “building foundation blocks for ongoing learning”.
He said there was also a continued effort to build teacher capacity.
Hunter Valley Grammar head of junior school Liz Thompson said she was “ecstatic” with the results, which she attributed to an effort to “demystify” maths by “front-loading” students with an understanding of mathematical language to help them better interpret problems.
The school also uses practical applications of maths, as well as formative assessment to provide feedback.
St James’ principal Niamh Marzol said the results came after the school employed a lead teacher, whose role is to work with teachers in kindergarten to year two classes to lift literacy and numeracy performance.
Each school was mentioned for their gain compared with previous years; schools with similar students; and other students at similar NAPLAN start points.
