Duration: 2:43
Transcript
Janette Bandjak, Senior Leader, Literacy: Craigmore High School is a large Year 7 to 12 secondary school. We're located in the northern suburbs of Adelaide. We have 1,300 students and we really celebrate the diversity of our student community.
Georgina Davis, Teacher: We know we have, in our site, a range of students and really diverse learners. This intervention program has allowed so many of our students to actually access school information and learn within their classes.
Melissa Saliba, Senior Speech Pathologist: So Tier 1 involves high-quality teaching for students across the school – building knowledge and skills to support literacy for everybody. Tier 2 is targeted intervention, but at a small-group or a small-class level, with enough staff support to make that effective. Specifically, in Year 7 and 8, we have an intervention that targets word reading. We also have English support, which targets the written language conventions. Sometimes that's not enough and they're still struggling, so then Tier 3 provides tailored intervention for those students in a way that they need it. We can timetable individual students to work with our literacy SSOs and our AHP1 speech pathologist to get additional one-on-one time.
Georgina Davis: We have our literacy coordinator. We also have speech pathologists, and we have a range of teachers, SSOs and other staff. We all work in different ways. So, me, in the sort of stereotypical teaching role, but I also have literacy intervention support staff. So they’re specifically from our literacy budget, hired to support us in the literacy scope within our classrooms.
Melissa Saliba: Over time, you see increased engagement, increased willingness to take risks. Ninety per cent of students across 2021 and 2022 improved in their decoding age. And some students improve in decoding age phenomenally; like, they gained 2 or 3 years.
Janette Bandjak: We haven't had all the answers straight away, but what we share is a moral imperative that every student can read and write when they leave our school and go on to thrive in the wider community. And being able to work with a team who's willing to trial strategies and not sit in the comfort zone – not necessarily knowing if they’ll work or not or how it will look in the classroom – I think, has been a major benefit of this process.
Keywords: multi-tiered system of supports