As Education Week, the annual celebration of education in Victoria, draws to a close, we reflect on the education-focused projects that Greater Shepparton Foundation and our partners have established to ensure local people have an equal opportunity to participate in education.
We know that access to early education is key to changing educational outcomes of students, improving their readiness for learning and to take advantage of the opportunities that education will afford. This early access and intervention can positively influence the trajectory of a young person’s life.
We are now three years on from the commencement of our major projects Little Learners and Oral Language Intervention. These projects are aimed at giving our young people the best start on their education journey, and we couldn’t be prouder of the results to date!
Each of our major projects is subject to a rigorous data collection and analysis process, to monitor and evaluate if they are meeting objectives. We are pleased to advise that these projects are not only meeting their objectives, they are exceeding expectations.
Little Learners commenced its third intake this year and continues to provide bilingual support to reduce language, social and cultural barriers to early education for our culturally and linguistically diverse community, known as CALD. By providing culturally sensitive language support to parents and children, we are able to increase access/enrolment and enhance these children’s experience and development in early education. Pleasingly, we have seen a 360 per cent increase in enrolments across the CALD community in the participating kindergartens from 2020 to 2022 with the bilingual support in place. If you would like to find out more about our Little Learners program, you can read the 2022 report on the ‘Major Projects’ page of our website.
Our Oral Language Intervention program, now delivered in all public primary school in Mooroopna and two kindergartens, is in stage three and is also enjoying great success. We are gathering evidence on this program to influence policy and decision makers, with an aim to enact broader adoption of this evidence-based model in more schools.
Evaluation highlighted that Year 1 students in 2022 who had participated in the Oral Language Intervention program in the previous year performed significantly better in oral language metrics than Year 1 students in 2021 who had not participated in the program in their Prep year. Comparable results showed an increased improvement of 79 per cent for pronunciation of letter sounds, 34 per cent for single word reading, and 25 per cent for unseen decodable texts for students who had accessed the program in their Prep year. The full report will be available soon; please also look out for this on our website.
In addition to Little Learners and Oral Language Intervention, we have our Lift Off education scholarships. Lift Off is our longest running program and is about to reach a 10-year milestone. The aim of Lift Off however, is different to that of Little Learners and Oral Language Intervention, as it supports young people to achieve their higher education aspirations as opposed to early education.
Lift Off sees scholarships awarded, ranging from $2000 to $10,000, to local school leavers predominantly aged 17 to 24.
Since inception, our Lift Off education scholarships have supported 120 local students into further education and to do so we have raised in excess of $500,000. With community support we aim to support another 120 students over the next 10 years!
To read more about these programs or any of Greater Shepparton Foundation’s other major projects please visit the ‘Major Projects’ and ‘Scholarships’ pages on our website at www.greatershepparton.foundation
If you would like to provide support to these education projects via a tax-deductible donation you can donate online via our website or alternatively you can email me at amanda@greatershepparton.foundation to discuss support.
Until next time,
Amanda McCulloch
Greater Shepparton Foundation executive officer