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Lansvale Public School is situated in an area of socio-economic disadvantage, but principal Mark Diamond hasn’t let this get in the way of his plan to drive educational excellence on a whole school level.
Located in south-western Sydney, NSW, the school has an Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA) value of 943, which is lower than the NSW average of 1,000, indicating a higher than average level of disadvantage.
Fifty-four per cent of enrolled students are in the bottom ICSEA quarter, and just 6% are in the top quarter. However, students’ maths and English outcomes have continued to improve markedly.
What’s more, external validation in 2016 found the school to be excelling in 12 of the 14 elements in the School Excellence Framework (SEF).
According to the school’s principal, Mark Diamond, value-added results against NAPLAN have boosted student performance in Years 3 and 5 at nearly twice the national rate.
A recent case study by the NSW Department of Education examined how the school has been sustaining this success through its ‘culture of excellence’, ‘adaptive planning’, ‘data celebrations’ and teacher-student engagement initiatives.
Below, The Educator speaks to Diamond to find out more.
TE: I understand that the school puts a strong emphasis on ‘adaptive planning’. Can you tell us more about this and how it improves efficiency throughout the school’s teaching and learning architecture?
MD: We plan in fortnightly teaching and learning cycles in order to personalise the engaging new student learning we expect in literacy and numeracy. Teachers work in teams where they collaboratively plan, deliver, assess and evaluate astutely in order to build incremental teacher learning about the enactment of this cycle for each student. This enables relevant, timely, rigorous and authentic learning to take place, challenging the developmental capacities of their learners. In short, teacher wisdom, intuition and judgement is expected and highly valued. Ongoing refinement of practice and increasingly focussed expertise is the result. Our school works hard to ensure our teaching actions are highly congruent with our strongly held beliefs about learning. We also strive to ensure that teacher learning experiences are coherent with our approach to rich student learning.
TE: What can you tell us about the impact of the school’s teacher professional learning?
MD: Our performance in English and Mathematics are trending nicely upwards. Our value added results against NAPLAN see us growing student performance between Year 3 and Year 5 at nearly twice the national rate. Having said that, we strongly value our small but vital data sets, as collected by individual teachers and tabled for dissection at these data celebrations. The data celebrations allow us to validate and or challenge our teacher judgments, moderated work samples and student profiles (literacy and numeracy progression tool) in actuality. We look at the raw data, discuss teaching and learning interventions on targeted individuals and cohorts of students and interrogate performance trends. Our staffing mix, professional learning and explicit instruction are all responsive to the findings of this regular celebratory event. We expect each child to reach their full potential and treat them “as if they were our very own”.
TE: The school places children and parents at the centre of student learning. How has the school been able to sustain this culture in an effective and successful way?
MD: We are determined to teach whole people and look for students’ strengths every bit as much as their challenges in order to create learning momentum for every individual. We see that every learning experience (formal and informal) is important in harnessing our students’ curiosity and love of learning. Highly engaging learning experiences are designed to maximise cognitive challenge, experiential problem solving and emotional impact (usually hard fun… but the noticing of other emotional responses are drawn out through rich talk). Parents are a child’s first and most consistent teacher and we embrace robust parental and community relationships at P&C (average attendance of over 40), parent forums, school development days and in classrooms. Our PaTCH Program is pivotal where we graduate upwards of 20 qualified classroom helpers who gain a TAFE pathway as a Student Learning Support Officer (SLSO). Our school is a vibrant learning community where passion and optimism abound.