St Joseph’s Primary School in Benalla has been announced as one of Australia’s highest performing schools and it is currently training staff in the latest literacy teaching model to build on that success.
The accolade was given by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority which used NAPLAN results to indicate that students at selected schools have been performing significantly above all other students nationally with similar socio educational advantage.
St Joseph’s Primary School principal Mary Dunstan said she was proud of staff who work tirelessly to improve the learning outcomes of all students.
“Being officially recognised as a high performing school is a great acknowledgement of the dedicated and hard-working staff of St Joseph’s,” Ms Dunstan said.
“During the last three years our results have been extremely pleasing and this is the product of a lot of hard work from our teachers, students and families.”
Not content to sit back and and enjoy the success, its entire learning support team has recently undergone four days of intense training in the Sounds Write synthetic phonics program.
Ms Dunstan said visible learning was the framework which guides all its teaching and learning, and Sounds Write was the next phase of that.
In 2020, St Joseph’s Primary School joined only a handful of other schools in Australia to achieve Visible Learning certification in recognition of the progress, as well as the achievement the school had made with the Visible Learning+ system.
Ms Dunstan thanked staff for continually striving to put in place evidence-based Visible Learning into day-to-day classroom practices and acknowledged past principal Trish Merlo and deputy principal Leigh Symons who implemented this vision from 2019 with all staff.
“From that time they committed to raising student outcomes, having high expectations for all students and implementing many strategic plans to achieve their goals,” Ms Dunstan said.
“Our results have shown over the past six years that we are making continual progress.
“This progress and improvement have been reflected in the outstanding NAPLAN results.
“This is a wonderful achievement for our school, and I am delighted to share this good news with the wider St Joseph’s community,” she said.
Sounds Write trainer James Lyra said the program provided teachers and schools with a very rigorous instructional model.
“The school’s made a huge commitment in training everybody, from Prep through to Year 6,” Mr Lyra said.
"We have 35 staff members, including the leadership team, here training with us, and they’ve undertaken four full days of training.
“It’s intense training that is rigorous and provides teacher with opportunities to practice the learning before they go into their classes and continue delivering this instructional process.
“Sounds Write is not the entire literacy block, or focus. But it’s an integral part of that literacy instruction.
“St Joseph’s decided they would build on the success of visible learning and continue to have a focus, for the next couple of years, making sure their instruction in the phonics aspect of their teaching is done well, is done rigorously and is done explicitly.
“It works from a sound to print approach. It works on allowing the children to hear the sounds in spoken words. Then we teach them how to spell and how to map those sounds with the spelling we have.
“So it’s a more natural way of working from a sound to print approach. It's systematic, which is the key to the high rates of success when schools use Sounds Write,” he said.